Penelope Lively
Penelope Lively (b. 1933) is a critically acclaimed British author of fiction for both children and adults. She won the Carnegie Medal for children’s fiction in 1973, for The Ghost of Thomas Kempe, and also the Man Booker Prize for her 1987 novel, Moon Tiger. Lively was made Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in the 2012 New Year Honours list.
My sister Lisa is an artist: she is not like other people.
Lisa is two years younger than I am, and we knew quite early on that she was artistic, partly because she could always draw so nicely, but also because of the way she behaved. She lives in a world of her own, our mother used to say. She was always the difficult one, always haying tempers and tantrums and getting upset about one thing and another, but once mother realised about her being artistic she made allowances. We all did. She’s got real talent, the art master at school said, you’ll have to take care of that, Mrs Harris, she’s going to need all the help she can get. And mother was thrilled to bits, she’s always admired creative people, she’d have loved to be able to write or paint herself but having Lisa turn out that way was the next best thing, or better; even, perhaps. When Lisa was fifteen mother went to work at Luigi’s, behind the counter, to save up so there’d be a bit extra in hand for Lisa, when she went to art school. Father had died three years before. It worried me rather, mother going out to work like that; she’s had asthma on and off for years now, and besides she felt awkward, serving in a shop. But the trouble is, she’s not qualified at anything, and in any case, as she said, a delicatessen isn’t quite like an ordinary grocer or a supermarket.
I was at college, by then, doing my teaching diploma. Lisa went to one of the London art schools, and came back at the end of her first term looking as weird as anything, you’d hardly have known her, her hair dyed red and wearing black clothes with pop art cut-outs stuck on and I don’t know what. It was just as well mother had saved up, because it all turned out much more expensive than we’d thought, even with Lisa’s grant. There was so much she had to do, like going to plays and things, and of course she needed smarter clothes, down there, and more of them, and then the next year she had to travel on the continent all the summer, to see great paintings and architecture. She was away for months, we hardly saw anything of her, and when she came back she’d changed completely all over again – her hair was blonde and frizzed out, and she was wearing a lot of leather things, very expensive, boots up to her thighs and long suede coats. She came home for Christmas and sometimes she was gay and chatty and made everybody laugh and other times she was bad-tempered and moody, but as mother said, she’d always been like that, from a little girl, and of course you had to expect it, with her temperament.
Mother had left Luigi’s by then, some time before, because of her leg (she got this trouble with her veins, which meant she mustn’t stand much) but she started doing a bit of work at home, for pin-money, making cushions and curtains for people: she’s always been good at needlework, she sometimes says she wonders if possibly that’s where Lisa’s creativity came from, if maybe there’s something in the family…
It missed me out, if there is. Still, I got my diploma (I did rather well, as it happens, one of the best in my year) and started teaching and not long after that I married Jim, whom I’d known at college, and we had the children quite soon, because I thought I’d go back to work later, when they were at school.
Lisa finished at her art college, and got whatever it is they get, and then she couldn’t find a job. At least she didn’t want any of the jobs she could have got, like window-dressing or jobs on magazines or for publishers or that kind of thing. And can you blame her, said mother, I mean, what a waste of her talents, it’s ridiculous, all that time she’s spent developing herself, and then they expect her to be tied down to some nine-to-five job like anyone else!
Lisa was fed up. She had to come and live at home. Mother turned out of her bedroom and had the builders put a skylight in and made it into a studio for Lisa, really very nice, with a bare polished floor and a big new easel mother got by selling that silver tea-set that was a wedding present (she says she never really liked it anyway). But then it turned out Lisa didn’t do that kind of painting, but funny things to do with bits of material all sort of glued together, and coloured paper cut out and stuck on to other sheets of paper. And when she did paint or draw it would be squatting on the floor, or lying on her stomach on the sofa.
I can’t make head nor tail of the kind of art Lisa does. I mean, I just don’t know if it’s any good or not. But then, I wouldn’t, would I? Nor Jim, nor mother, nor any of us. We’re not experienced in things like that; it’s not up to us to say.
Lisa mooched about at home for months. She said she wouldn’t have minded a job designing materials for some good firm – Liberty’s or something like that – provided there was just her doing it because she’s got this very individual style and it wouldn’t mix with other people’s, or may be she might arrange the exhibitions at the Victoria and Albert or the Tate or somewhere. She never seemed to get jobs like that, though, and anyway mother felt it would be unwise for her to commit herself because what she really ought to be doing was her own work, that’s all any artist should do, it’s as simple as that.
Actually Lisa did less and less painting, which mother said was tragic, her getting so disillusioned and discouraged, such a waste of talent. Mother would explain to people who asked what Lisa was doing nowadays about how disgraceful it was that the government didn’t see that people like her were given the opportunities and encouragement they need. Goodness knows, she’d say with a sigh, it’s rare enough – creative ability – and Mrs Watkins next door, or the vicar, or whoever it was, would nod doubtfully and say yes, they supposed so.
And then Bella Sims arrived and opened up this new gallery in the town. The Art Centre. Before, there’d only been the Craft Shop, which does have some quite odd-looking pictures but goes in for glass animals and corn dollies and all that too; Lisa was vicious about the Craft Shop. But Bella Sims’s place was real art, you could see that at once – lots of bare floor and pictures hung very far apart and pottery vases and bowls so expensive they didn’t even have a price on them. And Lisa took along some of her things one day and believe it or not Bella Sims said she liked them, and she’d put three of them in her next exhibition which was specially for local artists. Mother was so thrilled she cried when Lisa first told her.
Lisa was a bit off-hand about it all; she seemed to take the attitude that it was only to be expected. She got very thick with Bella Sims.
Bella Sims was fiftyish, one of those people with a loud, posh voice and hair that’s just been done at the hairdresser and lots of clunky expensive-looking jewellery. She scared the wits out of me, and mother too, actually, though mother kept saying what a marvellous person she was, and what an asset for the town. I didn’t enjoy the preview party for the exhibition, and nor did Jim; I was expecting Judy then, and Clive was eighteen months, so I was a bit done in and nobody talked to us much. But Lisa was having a good time, you could see; she was wearing all peasanty things then, and had her hair very long and shiny, she did look really very attractive. She met Melvyn at that party.
Melvyn was Bella’s son. He taught design at the Poly. That meant he was sort of creative too, though of course not a real artist like Lisa. He fell for her, heavily, and who could blame him I suppose, and they started going round together, and then quite soon they said they were getting married. We were all pleased, because Melvyn’s nice – you’d never know he was Bella’s son – and we didn’t realise till later that it was because of Francesca being on the way. Mother was rather upset about that, and felt she might have been a bit to blame, maybe she should have talked to Lisa about things more, but frankly I don’t think that would have made any difference. Actually she worried more about Lisa not being able to paint once the baby was born. She was pleased, of course, about Francesca, but she did feel it might be a pity for Lisa to tie herself down so soon.
Actually it didn’t work out that way. Lisa got into a habit almost at once of leaving Francesca with mother or with me whenever she wanted some time to herself – she was having to go up and down to London quite a lot by then to keep in touch with her old friends from college, and to try to find openings for her work. I had my two, of course, so, as she said, an extra one didn’t make much difference. It did get a bit more of a strain, though, the next year, after she’d had Jason and there was him too. Four children is quite a lot to keep an eye on, but of course mother helped out a lot, whenever her leg wasn’t too bad. Bella Sims, I need hardly say, didn’t go much for the granny bit.
Lisa had Alex the year after that. I’ve never understood, I must say, why Lisa has babies so much; I mean, she must know. Of course, she is vague and casual, but all the same… I’ve had my two, and that’s that, barring accidents, and I’m planning to go back to work when I can, eventually. I daresay Lisa would think that all very cold and calculating, but that’s the way I am. Lisa says she doesn’t believe in planning life, you just let things happen to you, you see what comes next.
Alex had this funny Chinese look from a tiny baby and it took us ages to cotton on, in fact I suppose he was eleven months or so before the penny finally dropped and we realised that, to put it frankly, Melvyn wasn’t the father.
It came as a bit of a blow, especially to poor mother. She went all quiet for days, and I must admit she’s never really liked Alex ever since, not like she dotes on the others.
The father was someone Lisa knew in London. He was from Thailand, not Chinese, actually. But in fact it was all over apparently sometime before Alex was born and she didn’t see him again.
Melvyn took it very well. I suppose he must have known before we did. In fact, Melvyn has been very good to Lisa from the start, nothing of what’s happened has been his fault in any way. Not many men would have coped with the children like he has, right from the beginning, which he had to because of Lisa being away quite a bit, or involved in her own things. Truth to tell, he was better with them, too. It’s not that Lisa’s a bad mother – I mean she doesn’t get cross or impatient, specially, she just doesn’t bother about them much. She says the worst thing you can do is to be over-protective; she says mother was a bit over-protective with her.
Bella Sims had some fairly nasty things to say; but then soon after that she sold the gallery and moved back to London and we never saw any more of her. This was the wrong kind of provincial town, apparently; art was never going to be a viable proposition.
Things got worse after Alex was born. Lisa went off more and more. Sometimes I’d find we had the children for days on end, or Melvyn would come round, pretty well at the end of his tether, saying could we lend a hand, Lisa was down in London seeing about some gallery which might show her stuff, or she’d gone off to Wales to see a woman who was doing the most fantastic ceramics.
It was after the time Francesca wandered off and got lost for a whole day, and the police found her in the end and then it turned out Lisa had been somewhere with Ravi, this Indian friend of hers, that things rather came to a head. Lisa and Melvyn had a row and Lisa brought all the children round to me, late one night, in their pyjamas, and said she was so upset about everything she’d have to go off on her own for a few days to try to think things over. Jim had flu and I’d just got over it myself so I was a bit sharp with her: I said couldn’t Melvyn have them, and she said no, Melvyn had to teach all next day, which was probably true enough. And anyway, she said, they’re my children, I’m responsible for them, I’ve got to work out what to do. She was wearing a long red and blue thing of some hand-blocked stuff, and lots of silver bracelets, and she looked exhausted and very dashing both at the same time, somehow; the children were all crying.
So I took them, of course, and she was gone for a week or so. We talked things over while she was gone. Jim and I talked, and Jim said (which he never had before) that he thought Lisa ought to pull herself together a bit, and I had to agree. It was easier with her not being there; somehow when Lisa’s with you, you always end up feeling that she really can’t be expected to do what other people do, I actually feel bad if I see Lisa washing a floor or doing nappies or any of the things I do myself every day. It does seem different for her, somehow.
And mother talked to Melvyn, who’d been round to find out where the children were. Mother was very sympathetic; she knows what living with Lisa is like; we all do. She said to Melvyn that of course Lisa had been silly and irresponsible, nobody could deny that. She told Melvyn, with a little laugh to try to cheer things up a bit, that there’d been occasions when Lisa was a small girl and was being particularly wilful and tiresome that she’d been on the verge of giving her a good smack. And then, she said, one used to remember just in time that there is a point beyond which she – people like her – simply cannot help themselves. One just can’t expect the same things you can from other people.
I don’t know what Melvyn thought about that; he didn’t say. After the divorce came through he married Sylvie Fletcher who works in the library; I was at school with her and she’s very nice but quite ordinary. Mother always says it must seem such a come down after Lisa. They’ve got a little boy now, and Melvyn takes a lot of trouble to see Francesca and Jason (and Alex too, in fact) as much as he can – and it is trouble because he has to trail down to London and try to find where Lisa’s moved to now, unless it’s one of the times Jim and I are having the children, or mother.
Mother and I had to talk, too. I’d gone round there and found her up in Lisa’s old studio, just standing looking at a great thing Lisa had done that was partly oil paint slapped on very thick and partly bits of material stuck on and then painted over; in the top corner there was a picture of the Duke of Edinburgh from a magazine, sideways on and varnished over. I think it must have been meant to be funny, or sarcastic or something. We both stood in front of it for a bit and mother said, ‘Of course, it is very good, isn’t it?’
I said I honestly didn’t know.
We both felt a bit awkward in there; Lisa has always been very fussy about her privacy. She says the one thing people absolutely have no right to do is push themselves into other people’s lives; she is very strong for people being independent and having individual rights. So mother and I just had a quick tidy because the dust was bothering mother, and then we went downstairs and drank a cup of tea and chatted. Mother talked about this book she’d been reading about Augustus John; she’s very interested in biographies of famous poets and artists and people like that. She was saying what a fascinating person he must have been but of course he did behave very badly to people, his wife and all those other women, but all the same it must have been terribly exhilarating, life with someone like that. You could see she was half thinking of Lisa. I was feeling snappish, the children were getting me down rather, and I said Lisa wasn’t Augustus John, was she? We don’t really know, do we – if she’s any good or not.
There was a silence. We looked at each other. And then mother looked away and said, ‘No. I know we don’t. But she just might be, mightn’t she? And it would be so awful if she was and nobody had been understanding and helpful.’
Lisa came back for the children once she’d found a flat. She’d had her hair cut off and what was left was like a little boy’s, all smoothed into the back of her neck; it made her look about sixteen. Lisa is very small and thin, I should say; people always offer to carry suitcases for her, if you see her doing anything involving effort you automatically find yourself offering to do it for her because you feel she won’t be able to manage and anyway it makes you feel guilty watching her.
She said the hair was symbolic; she was making a fresh start and getting rid of the atmosphere that had been holding her back (I suppose she meant poor Melvyn) and actually everything was going to be good because Ravi’s father who was an Indian businessman and quite rich was going to buy a little gallery in Islington that Ravi was going to run and she was frantically busy getting enough stuff together for an exhibition.
The gallery didn’t last long because it kept losing money and after a bit Ravi’s father, who turned out to be quite an ordinary businessman after all and not as sensitive and interested in art as Lisa had thought, said he was cutting his losses and selling up. In fact Ravi and Lisa weren’t living together by then anyway because Lisa had realised that the reason her work wasn’t really right was that she’d always been in cities and in fact what she needed to fulfil herself properly was to get away somewhere remote and live a very simple, hard-working life. Actually, she thought, pottery was the right medium for her, once she could scrape up enough for a wheel and everything.
Mother helped out with that, financially, and Lisa took the children down to this place in Somerset where a man she knew, someone quite rich, had this big old house that was a sort of commune for artists, and for parties of young people to come and study nature and the environment. We went down there, once when Lisa wanted us to take Alex for a bit, because he’d not been well and she was finding it a bit of a strain coping with him. There was certainly a lot of environment there, it was miles from anywhere, except the village, and there wasn’t much of that, so that there seemed to be more artists than ordinary village people. It was a hot summer and Lisa and the rest were going round with just about no clothes on, more like the south of France than west Somerset and I rather got the impression that some of the older village people didn’t like it all that much, and there was an outdoor pop festival one weekend that went on to all hours, and this man who owned the place had made the church into an exhibition room for the artists. It was one of those little grey stone churches with old carvings and so on and it looked queer, all done out inside with huge violent-coloured paintings and peculiar sculptures. Lisa said actually it was frightfully good for these people, to be exposed to a today kind of life, they were so cut off down there, and to be given the sort of visual shock that might get them really looking and thinking.
Eventually Lisa began to feel a bit cut off herself, and there’d been some trouble with the county child care people which Lisa said was a lot of ridiculous fuss, it was just that Francesca had got this funny habit of wandering off sometimes and actually it was good that she felt so free and uninhibited, most people stifle their children so. Francesca was six by then, and Jason five. Jason had this bad stammer; he still has, sometimes he can’t seem to get a word out for hours.
Lisa came home to mother’s for a bit then, because rents in London were sky-high and it would have meant her getting a job, which of course was out of the question, if she was going to keep up her potting, and the weaving she had got very keen on now. And at mother’s she had the studio, so it might work out quite well, she thought, provided she kept in touch with people and didn’t feel too much out on a limb.
Jim and I had Alex more or less permanently by then; we are very fond of him, he seems almost like ours now which is just as well, I suppose. It is just as well too that Jim is the kind of person he is; Lisa thinks he is dull, I know, but that is just her opinion, and as I have got older I have got less and less certain that she gets things right. In fact, around this time I did have a kind of outburst, with mother, which I suppose was about Lisa, indirectly. She had gone down to London to keep in touch with people, and there had been a business with Francesca at school (sometimes she steals things, it is very awkward, they are going to have the educational psychologist people look at her) and I had had to see to it all. I was feeling a bit fed up too because what with Alex, and having so much to do, I’d realised it wasn’t going to be any good trying to go back to work at the end of the year as I’d planned. Maybe you should be like Lisa, and not plan. Anyway, mother was telling me about this biography of Dylan Thomas she’d been reading, and what an extraordinary eccentric person he was and how fascinating to know. Actually I’d read the book too and personally I don’t see why you shouldn’t write just as good poetry without borrowing money off people all the time and telling lies.
Once, when I was at college, one of the tutors got this well-known poet to come and give a talk to the second-year English. He had glasses with thick rims and a rather old-fashioned-looking suit and frankly he might have been somebody’s father, or your bank manager. He was very friendly and he talked to us in the common-room afterwards and he wasn’t rude to anyone. I told mother about it, later, and she said she wondered if he was all that good – as a poet, that is.
And I suddenly blew up when she was going on like this about Dylan Thomas. I said – shouted – ‘T. S. Eliot worked in an office. Gustav Holst was a bloody schoolteacher.’
Mother looked startled. She said, ‘Who?’ She’s less interested in musicians.
I said crossly, ‘Oh, never mind. Just there’s more than one way of going about things.’ And then the children started squabbling and we were distracted and the subject never came up again, not quite like that.
Lisa got a part-share of a flat in London with a friend; she had to be down there because there was this person who was talking of setting up a craft workshop for potters and weavers and that, a fantastic new scheme, and she needed to be on the spot for when it came off. It was difficult for her to have the children there, so Francesca stayed with mother and the two little ones with us. Francesca settled down well at school and began to behave a lot better, and Jason’s stammer was improving, and then all of a sudden Lisa turned up, as brown as a conker, with her hair long again, and henna-dyed now, and said she’d met these incredible Americans in Morocco, who had this atelier, and she was going to work there and learn this amazing new enamelling technique. That was what she ought to have been doing all along, she said, if only she’d realised, not messing about with pots and fabrics. She was taking the children with her, she said, because growing up in an English provincial town was so stultifying for them, and it was nice and cheap out there.
She took Alex too, but after six months she suddenly sent him back again with a peculiar German friend of hers; we had to collect him at Heathrow. He kept wetting the bed apparently and although Lisa isn’t particularly fussy about that kind of thing she said she had the feeling he wasn’t very adaptable.
And so it goes on. She came back from Morocco after a couple of years, and there was a spell in London when a rather well-off Dutch person that we thought she was going to marry bought her a house in Fulham. For six months Francesca went to a very expensive school where all the teaching was done in French, and then the Dutch person went off and Lisa found the house was rented, not paid for like she’d thought, so she came home again for a bit to sort things out, and Francesca went to the comprehensive.
And then there was Wales with the Polish sculptor, and then the Dordogne with the tapestry people, and London again, and back here for a bit, and the cottage in Sussex that someone lent her…
The last time she was here she had a curious creased look about her, like a dress that had been put away in a drawer and not properly hung out, and I suddenly realised that she is nearly forty now, Lisa. It doesn’t seem right; she is a person that things have always been in front of, somehow, not behind.
Mother and I cleaned out her old studio, the other day. Mother has this feeling that Francesca may be talented, in which case she will need to use it. We dusted and polished and sorted out the cupboard with Lisa’s old paintings and collages and whatnot. They all looked rather shabby, and somehow withered – not quite as large or bright as one had remembered. Mother said doubtfully, ‘I wonder if she would like any of these sent down to London?’ And then, ‘Of course it is a pity she has had such an unsettled sort of life.’
That ‘had’ did not strike either of us for a moment or two. After a bit mother began to put the things away in the cupboard again, very carefully; mother is past seventy now and the stooping was awkward for her. I persuaded her to sit down and I finished off. There was one portfolio of things Lisa did at school, really nice drawings of flowers and leaves and a pencil portrait of another girl whose name neither mother nor I could remember. Mother put these aside; she thought she might have them framed and hang them in the hall. Holding them, she said, ‘Though with her temperament I suppose you could not expect that she would settle and at least she has always been free to express herself, which is the important thing.’ When I did not answer she said, ‘Isn’t it, dear?’ and I said, ‘Yes. Yes, I think so, mother.’