Through a looking glass

This week I started reading Elizabeth Jane Howard's The Long View. I am in awe of it already - a deep, gorgeously written, beautifully uncomfortable and smart exploration of a dysfunctional long-term relationship. At the start, the protagonist is 43 and feels irretrievably old; as the book goes on, time moves backwards, so we find she felt old at 37; and that's as far as I've got so far. She is as beautiful and discomforting as the book. 

At 43, she has a daughter aged 19 and a son aged 25 or so, on the brink of marriage. As a just-turned-40 myself, I read this and imagine myself meeting a future son- or daughter-in-law, although our kids are still just into secondary school. I often feel barely out of being teenage myself, but I have become increasingly aware that, of course, the world doesn't see me like that. I'm not sure that the term 'matron' feels very 2021, but that's how I'm seen, most of the time. I have kids, some middle-aged spread, no-nonsense mannerisms, a certain confidence, an increasing ability to make myself heard.

Yet last week in Scotland, after a hot hill walk, I walked into a pub with our eldest daughter and was asked for ID. Obviously I was wearing a face mask, so a large number of my wrinkles were heavily obscured, and I was backlit from the window opposite the bar. After I had picked myself off the floor and our daughter had finished dying of laughter, I was, of course, flattered, before being then dismayed. I realised that I had grown to rather like being seen as une femme d'une certain age. Was that appearance so quickly removed when I was sweating, in a cutoff t-shirt, without make-up and outside a professional context?

The protagonist in The Long View projects calmness, control and knowledge to the young women in her life, who are fearful, emotional and who make panicked, bad decisions. She realises her age and learning through the contrast with them. She feels unimaginative, conventional and unhappy, but those around her - with the exception of her husband - see poise, grace and intelligence. The brilliance of Howard's writing is that she allows us to see Mrs Fleming as an outsider, and also to feel her from the inside, to inhabit her skin. After all, don't we all want to be able to see ourselves as others see us, and not just to know what it feels like to be inside ourselves?

We look in mirrors; compose our faces on Zoom; examine our faces in the photos others take of us; carefully examine our social media profiles to assess what image we project to the strangers of the internet. But we don't really have a clue what others make of us: and the older we get, the less people tell us. As a child, you get school reports; your classmates tell you that you're square, or cool, or boring, with ruthless precision. You graduate through yearbook citations, parental critique,  annual performance reviews at work. But at a certain point, people stop telling you whether you're really like. The honesty of schoolkids becomes the dissembling of adults who want to preserve as many good relations as possible.

I said goodbye to a wonderful colleague this week who has gone onto a new job. I hired her over a year ago, during lockdown, and have only met her in person once while she's worked with me. At our handover chat, I asked her to give me a warts and all critique of what I'm really like to work for. She said lots of lovely flattering things but didn't give me the character assassination I was looking for.

We are left trying to piece together our outward presentation from glimpses and contradictory clues - like ascertaining that a particle exists through the reactions of other particles in its presence, without being able to see the particle itself. A highly unsatisfactory state to be in, I find.