How It All Began by Penelope Lively

cell—everything is going on around you but you are not quite part of it. You open your mouth and you sound like a child; you know that you are someone else, but you cannot explain it.
    With the teacher and her daughter he did sometimes feel that his real self could emerge. He had been at first amused by Charlotte’s recourse to children’s books, but now saw that this was enterprising and effective. He took the books back with him and pored over the texts, hiding them from his nephew and the other young men. He read about talking rabbits and tigers that came to tea, with satisfaction. He remembered learning to read as a child, discovering story.
    He talked of this to Charlotte, when next they met. Tried to talk of it, hobbled as always by the search for the right word. He had been thinking about story—how it works.
    “Story go always forward—this happen, then this. That is what we want. We want to know how it happen, what comes next. How one thing make happen another.”
    “Exactly,” said Charlotte. “Narrative. But a contrivance—a clever contrivance, if successful.”
    “Con . . . trivance?”
    “Made up. Invented.”
    “Yes, yes. And that is why we enjoy. Because it is not like our life—the way we live, which is . . .“—he frowned—”. . . very much accident. You get job. Your wife go. You lose job. You are knock down by bus, perhaps.”
    “You get mugged,” said Charlotte. “You break your hip.”
    Anton frowned further, then smiled. “And so I am here, like this, in your daughter house, because of that.”
    “We have a word for it—an odd one. Happenstance.”
    “And it is story,” said Anton. “But not like story in book. It is . . . no one can control.”
    “Anarchy. Contingency.”
    “Sorry?”
    “No—
I’m
sorry. The unruly world in which we have to live. One’s unreliable progress. Are you religious, Anton?”
    He spread his hands, shook his head.
    “Me neither. It’s said to be a consolation. Or a crutch.” She tapped hers.
    “My mother, yes. She go out now only for the church.”
    “I rather envy her. I tried, way back, but faith eluded me. There was no way I could believe.”
    “And in the Bible,” said Anton thoughtfully. “There are many stories.”
    “Indeed. The good Samaritan. The loaves and the fishes. But stories with a message. All very well, but people can be put off by messages. The form needs to get more sophisticated.”
    “When I was a boy,” said Anton, “I liked very much . . . how do you say? . . . stories about princes and princesses and giants and magic things.”
    “Fairy stories, we say. Not that fairies much come into them. Messages, again.”
    “The poor person always come out good in the end?”
    “Exactly.”
    “Which is not what happen in the world.”
    “Quite so. But we love to think it might.”
    Anton smiled. “In fairy story, the poor workers on the building site all find bag of gold, and the rich developer man is eat up by the giant.”
    “Instead of which, the rich bankers let all their gold melt away, or so we understand, so there is nothing to pay the poor workers and no work anyway.”
    He laughed. “But gold is not all good. There was the king whowished everything he touch turn to gold, and then he could not eat or drink.”
    “Ooh . . .” said Charlotte. “We’re into mythology now. Midas.”
    “From school, I remember this story. But that is message too. You must not want too much.”
    “Yes. Greed. But you’re right. Messages die hard. The modern novel has tried to shed them, though I suppose they creep in here and there.”
    “And children books have, sometimes.”
    “Absolutely. Although not, I think, in this week’s study. Our new text is about a pig and a spider, Anton. Actually, we are moving up the age range. This is for people of around eight or nine. Or seventy-six. Or . . . ?”
    “Forty-five,” said Anton.
    “And the spider has my name,