Dancing Fish and Ammonites: A Memoir by Penelope Lively Read Free Book Online

Rachel Reckitt, fell off her horse when she was eighty-two. She was a few miles from home, on the edge of the Brendons, in west Somerset, and the horse, finding himself riderless, simply did what horses do, and headed for his stable. A neighbor spotted him, a search party was organized, and found Rachel on her way down from the hill, slightly bruised and annoyed about all the fuss. After that, we persuaded her to wear a whistle when out riding. She objected strongly, and had to be reminded that this strategy had saved the day for her own elderly uncle, many years before, who had come off his horse up on Exmoor and lay for hours in a bog with a fractured leg.
    Rachel died at eighty-six, working daily in her studio until her last illness. That horse survived her, the last of many she had owned, in this case an irritable pony called Fury (“A tiresome creature,” she used to say, but she could no longer get up on to the big hunters she preferred). Fury himself was fifteen, which is a ripe age for a horse, and in the sad and onerous dispersal process after her death he became a central problem: nobody wanted him. Eventually, someone with field space was bribed to provide an expensive retirement.
    Fury was true to form, in this; he was all set to cost. Old age costs; it costs the nation, it costs those going through it. We contribute nothing, but require maintenance – a winter fuel allowance, free TV license, bus pass, free prescriptions, all the state indulgences. Those don’t add up to luxury, for anyone, any more than the state pension does other than provide basic subsistence. And old age has its needs, its greeds. You may not yearn for a Caribbean cruise – I don’t – but certain comforts have become essential, the accustomed perks that make daily existence a bit more than just that. I can’t start the day without a bowl of the right kind of muesli topped with some fruit and sheep’s milk yogurt; I can’t end it without a glass (or two) of wine. I need the diversions of radio and television. I want flowers in the house and something tempting to eat – these are greeds, I think, rather than needs. And – high priority – there is reading, the daily fix, the time of immersion in whatever is top of my book pile right now. As demands, requirements, all of this is relatively modest. Much of it – the reading, the flowers – goes back to prelapsarian days before old age. The difference, though, is that then there were further needs and greeds, and those seem to have melted away, to have tactfully absented themselves as though to make things a bit easier because they would indeed be an encumbrance now.
    I am no longer acquisitive. I was never exactly voracious, but I could fall prey to sudden lust: one simply could not live a moment longer without that sampler spotted in an antique shop, or that picture or rug or chair. No longer. I can admire, but I no longer covet. Books of course are another matter; books are not acquisitions, they are necessities.
    I don’t need or want excitement. Pleasure, enjoyment – yes. But that restless feeling that you must have something happen, you must look ahead, anticipate, you need a rush of adrenaline – that is gone, quite gone. Thanks be. Something to look forward to – yes. Seeing family, friends. Outings – a theater, a gallery, a jaunt. Time in Somerset with Josephine. But I no longer want that dangerous edge to things – anticipation heightened by risk, the sense of adventure. I am done with adventure.
    I was going to write: I am no longer aspirational. But that is not quite true. I do aspire in terms of wanting to do what I do as well as possible. I would still like to write a good book. But I don’t have that ferocity for achievement that I can remember from early writing days: write a good book or bust. I have never been particularly competitive – and writers can be competitive, a trait fostered by the spectator sport of literary prizes; nowadays I find that it is