A Very Private Life

by Michael Frayn

  “Exactly,” says Omacatl.

  In any case, the world around her has not stood still all this time. Society has changed. The tightly knit old-fashioned world in which she was brought up—the ordered world of children and parents, uncles and aunts and grandparents, great-uncles, and great-great-aunts and great-great-great-grandparents—is passing away. Nowadays people are tending to give up having children altogether and to stake their little claim upon immortality simply by living forever instead. It was the tyranny of the parent-child and child-parent relationships which dominated society in the past and which so intolerably violated the privacy of child and parent alike. Now that this last old, rusty lock has been forced, the shackles of blood relationships of every sort are beginning to fall away. Of course the new way of life brings problems of its own. When has a revolution ever been easy? But to Uncumber, as to the rest of her generation, the challenge is stimulating and absorbing.

  So, her adventures over, she will live happily forever after.

  Or, at any rate, until one day when something goes drastically wrong with the air supply and the whole house blows up, shooting her violently into the outside world once again. She falls into a deep deposit of a substance she has never seen before—snow. There are no trees in this part of the outside world; and there is no warmth. Just unending, dazzling grey snow stretching as far as the eye can see in every direction. Something has happened to her back in the explosion; she cannot move. She lies buried up to her neck in the pure grey softness, and the odd, dazzling light plays tricks on her eyes, causing her to have hallucinations as her consciousness fades. One of the hallucinations is her old number at home—977–921–773–206–302—and as it floats before her eyes it seems just as worn-looking and familiar as it did those many years ago.

  She writes it out in the snow beside her before she freezes to death.

  Family reunion

  As soon as Uncumber is back inside a house and restored to life again, of course, she calls the number. Her mother appears in the chamber, looking calm and cheerful.

  “Hello!” says her mother amiably. “I didn’t expect to see you. They called up a day to two ago to say you were dead.”

  “I was,” explains Uncumber, astonished at her mother’s calmness. “But now I’m alive again.”

  Her mother switches in her father and Sulpice. “Hello!” they both say cheerfully in their turn. “We thought you were dead.”

  The sight of those three faces gazing so calmly out at her brings back all Uncumber’s old irritation in a rush.

  “You don’t seem very surprised to see me,” she complains. “I’ve been gone for nearly twenty years! I’ve been through all sorts of terrible things! I was cut off from you! Alone!” Her voice breaks, and she weeps—her first tears for many years. “And all you can say is ‘Hello,’ just like that!”

  Her family gazes at her as calmly as ever.

  “Cumby,” explains Sulpice, “we thought you were dead, that’s the thing. They told us you were dead. So of course we’re all dosed up to the eyebrows with calmants and anti-depressants, to stop ourselves being distressed. That’s why we can’t be more surprised and pleased.”

  “Well, it’s disgusting!” Uncumber weeps. “Get yourselves uncalmed! Get yourselves dis-anti-distressed and cry, or laugh, or do something!”

  So they take decalmants and medicaments for heightening emotional response; and then they cry and laugh and all talk at once, they are so pleased to see her.

  “Oh, Cumby!” they say, sobbing. “After all these years! We thought we’d never see you again! Where have you been? Why haven’t you ever called us? Oh, Cumby, your coming back like this is the most wonderful thing that ever happened! We don’t know whether to laugh or cry!”

  And so on.

  “It’s just the same old Cumby!” Sulpice says, weeping happily. “She hasn’t changed a bit! Just as irritable and cross-grained as ever! ‘It’s disgusting’—that’s almost the first thing she said! She’s lost for twenty years, and the first thing she says when she gets back is, ‘It’s disgusting!’ Oh, Cumby!”

  And Uncumber takes a pill or two herself and weeps and laughs with them, to show how pleased she is to see them again.

  But later on, after she has told them everything that has happened to her, and they’ve told her everything that has happened to them, and all the pills have begun to wear off, they remember how much calmer it was while she was away; and she begins to wonder just what Catl and some of her new emotional colleagues would say if they could see her carrying on like this with a lot of old-fashioned blood relations out of the past. So they go on calling on each other for a week or two, and then, to their mutual relief, they let the acquaintance drop again.

  Now Uncumber feels that she really has come to terms with the whole of her past and settled accounts with it for good and all. Or, at any rate, for the next two or three hundred years. Then a very strange thing happens to her. In a sudden inexplicable fit of restlessness and dissatisfaction she …

  But that’s another story.

  About the Author

  Michael Frayn was born in London in 1933 and began his career as a journalist on the Guardian and the Observer. His novels include Headlong, Spies and Skios. He has also published two works of philosophy, Constructions and The Human Touch, and a memoir, My Father’s Fortune. His seventeen plays range from Noises Off, recently chosen as one of the nation’s three favourite plays, to Copenhagen. He is married to the writer Claire Tomalin.

  By the Same Author

  fiction

  THE TIN MEN

  THE RUSSIAN INTERPRETER

  TOWARDS THE END OF THE MORNING

  SWEET DREAMS

  THE TRICK OF IT

  A LANDING ON THE SUN

  NOW YOU KNOW

  HEADLONG

  SPIES

  SKIOS

  non-fiction

  CONSTRUCTIONS

  CELIA’S SECRET: AN INVESTIGATION (with David Burke)

  THE HUMAN TOUCH

  MY FATHER’S FORTUNE

  plays

  THE TWO OF US

  ALPHABETICAL ORDER

  DONKEYS’ YEARS

  CLOUDS

  BALMORAL

  MAKE AND BREAK

  NOISES OFF

  BENEFACTORS

  LOOK LOOK

  HERE

  NOW YOU KNOW

  COPENHAGEN

  ALARMS & EXCURSIONS

  DEMOCRACY

  AFTERLIFE

  films and television

  CLOCKWISE

  FIRST AND LAST

  REMEMBER ME?

  translations

  THE SEAGULL (Chekhov)

  UNCLE VANYA (Chekhov)

  THREE SISTERS (Chekhov)

  THE CHERRY ORCHARD (Chekhov)

  THE SNEEZE (Chekhov)

  WILD HONEY (Chekhov)

  THE FRUITS OF ENLIGHTENMENT (Tolstoy)

  EXCHANGE (Trifonov)

  NUMBER ONE (Anouilh)

  collections

  COLLECTED COLUMNS

  STAGE DIRECTIONS

  TRAVELS WITH A TYPEWRITER

  MATCHBOX THEATRE: THIRTY SHORT ENTERTAINMENTS

  Copyright

  First published in 1968 by Viking Press

  First published in 2015 by

  Faber & Faber Ltd

  Bloomsbury House

  74–77 Great Russell Street

  London WC1B 3DA

  This ebook edition first published in 2015

  All rights reserved

  © Michael Frayn, 1968, 2015

  Cover design by Faber

  Cover image © RyanJLane / Getty

  The right of Michael Frayn to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by th
e publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–0–571–32986–1