Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [106]
Though she lives only a few blocks from the Zoo, this is the first time Vinnie has visited it all year, and she’s only here now because some American cousins insisted on coming. These cousins, who are frantically “doing London” in three days, have already gone on to the National Gallery. Vinnie lingers here partly from the sense that, having paid several pounds to enter the Zoo, she might as well get her money’s worth, and partly because it’s a fine day and her project is ahead of schedule. All her London data has been collected; she has read most of the relevant background material, and she has traveled to Oxford, Kent, Hampshire, and Norfolk to talk with experts in children’s literature and folklore.
It isn’t in Vinnie’s nature to be wildly euphoric, but today she is at the peak of her own emotional curve, even off the graph. She is happier than she has been in months—maybe even in years. Everyone and everything looks good to her: the animals, the other visitors, the graceful new-leafed trees and the damp, shining lawns of Regent’s Park. Even her cousins, whom she usually thinks of as boring, today seem only forgivably naive. She hasn’t had a visit from Fido—or even thought of him—for days. For all she knows, he has followed Chuck to Wiltshire.
As she sits alone on her bench, Vinnie not only feels happy but curiously free. She is far from Corinth University, and from the duties and constraints of the role of Spinster Professor. The demanding and defining voices of her colleagues and students and friends are stilled. Moreover, English literature, to which in early childhood she had given her deepest trust, and which for half a century has suggested what she might do, think, feel, desire, and become, has suddenly fallen silent. Now, at last, all those books have no instructions for her, no demands—because she is just too old.
In the world of classic British fiction, the one Vinnie knows best, almost the entire population is under fifty, or even under forty—as was true of the real world when the novel was invented. The few older people—especially women—who are allowed into a story are usually cast as relatives; and Vinnie is no one’s mother, daughter, or sister. People over fifty who aren’t relatives are pushed into minor parts, character parts, and are usually portrayed as comic, pathetic, or disagreeable. Occasionally one will appear in the role of tutor or guide to some young protagonist, but more often than not their advice and example are bad; their histories a warning rather than a model.
In most novels it is taken for granted that people over fifty are as set in their ways as elderly apple trees, and as permanently shaped and scarred by the years they have weathered. The literary convention is that nothing major can happen to them except through subtraction. They may be struck by lightning or pruned by the hand of man; they may grow weak or hollow; their sparse fruit may become misshapen, spotted, or sourly crabbed. They may endure these changes nobly or meanly. But they cannot, even under the best of conditions, put out new growth or burst into lush and unexpected bloom.
Even today there are disproportionately few older characters in fiction. The conventions hold, and the contemporary novelist, like an up-to-date fruit-grower, reconstructs the natural landscape, removing most of the aging trees to leave room for young saplings that haven’t yet been grafted or put down deep roots. Vinnie has accepted the convention; she has tried for years to accustom herself to the idea that the rest of her life will be a mere epilogue to what was never, it has to be admitted, a