A Young Woman's Guide to Ambition

A YOUNG WOMAN’S GUIDE TO AMBITION

They used to say (maybe some still do) that ambition is what gets you out of bed of a morning. Though it does depend on the ambition. If you want to write a novel why bother? Write the novel by all means. But do you need to get out of bed?

Is ambition a good thing? The obvious answer is, depends on the ambition. Yeees. But it’s a little more complicated isn’t it. Why do people have ambitions? Maybe they want to be famous. Maybe they want to be rich. Maybe they want to be fulfilled. In this day and age we might think that only the last of these is worthwhile, truly worthwhile. But then things start getting slippery. Being famous means more people listen to you and if you have a propensity for good you may influence them. Being rich may mean you have surplus money to devote to good causes. But just being fulfilled?

Is this sort of ambition a trifle self-centred, a word that sounds just a little bit better than selfish. Are you thinking of the others in your life? Do you have any others in your life, or do you just live with your hobby? All very 2025. Lots of time to devote to yourself, get people in- trainers, influencers, gurus, to make you feel even better.

It wasn’t ever thus. There was honour and shame which latter turned into blame and endless recrimination and litigation. The below was once written of the Emperor Maximilian, a cadet of Franz Josef of Austria. In the middle of the 19th century Napoleon III decided to invade Mexico because he reckoned it owed him money. He needed a puppet ruler and chose Max.

But after Napper tired of the game and pulled the French forces out Max stayed on when he should have got the hell out of there. He said the Mexicans couldn’t just up sticks and leave so why should he? This didn’t stop a large number of the natives hating his guts, and it wasn’t long before they put him up against a wall and shot him (never mind who the Judge and Ruby are- they are not germane and unlike Maximilian did not even speak German)

Those were the last days of honour. Maximilian acted in ways quite contrary to his own interests skewed always by the perception of others, and perceptions of perceptions. Honour’s obverse is shame, and old men like the Judge played out shame’s requiem too. They rarely reflected. Reflection is for mirrors and Ruby sat in her darkened boudoir staring into mirrors where she found guilt and multiple identity. The long shut gates of Olympus were about to be revisited; new interpretations on old mythologies. The best stories have an infinity of meanings, correspondences, significance. Proteus dreams anew, fragmented visions, cubist nightmares. The Old World will at last subvert the New. The world of action will cease to hold, men will be fissured, the awareness of the act will split from the act, which will itself seek explanation and justification. Morality’s gaping fault lines will at last eradicate fault. Blame, the essential conduit between honour and shame, will pervert. Men who were always bestial and bloody will become more terrible yet as their acts become suffused with bogus credos and excoriating hatreds.

Some sort of history of the last hundred and fifty years. An infinity of meanings so my earlier remarks are clearly a species of the Devil’s advocacy. But never underestimate the articulacy and sweet bogus reasoning of the Devil.

Enough of this; you want a story. An illustrative tale hopefully, about ambition.

*********

“Valerie Beauregard stand up!”

A glamorous, bored and sulky girl stood up.

“What on earth was that pretentious nonsense”?

“You wanted to know what we proposed to do with our lives”

“Miss!”

“What did I miss”.

“You call me Miss”

“This is a finishing school for young adult women. I don’t call you Miss”

“You’re expelled”

“Good”

“And you’ve wasted your father’s money”

“What do you know about my father?”

“He drove you here”.

“The man with the big car and the big chequebook. That’s not my father. That’s my lover”

An intake of breath from the entire class in the Year Of Our Lord nineteen hundred and fifty nine. Valerie Beauregard had arrived a little early for the 60s.

**************************

Valerie Beauregard believed in strength in numbers. Eggs and baskets made sense to her. Houses, cars, men- one was never enough. Mind you she didn’t own any of the houses or any of the cars. And she wasn’t married to any of the men. Captain Timothy Beauregard was stinking rich. Towser Romaine was bloody good in bed. Brian Capstick was a teacher, a cultured man who knew about art and literature and architecture. Dave Mitchell doted on her.

Valerie wasn’t as stupid as she sounded. Most of the time it suited her to sound stupid. It got her out of trouble. Money and sex were fun and frankly she couldn’t really live without either of them. But Captain Tim was on a yacht off the Maldives (and had parked her in the Finishing School as a joke) and Towser was in East Berlin- people who said they were in MI6 usually weren’t but she’d never caught him out even with the best atlas she (or Beauregard) could afford.

Mitchell was for her depressions- he polished her ego with the best wax around. Brian Capstick was her man of the month though. She loved his knowledge She wanted to learn as much as she could. She wanted to swan around studios and dinner parties showing off her new found knowledge. She had grown up in a terraced house with anaglypta wallpaper and an outside toilet. Her parents had listened to the radio every night- the BBC Light Programme, a diet of Mantovani and Semprini. Her big sister (big in more ways than one) sat with them.

So that fussy little teacher at the school had touched a current nerve when she’d asked the class to write whatever they wanted to about ambition. Her ambition was general in the extreme, as big as Chambers Dictionary or Diderot’s L’ Encyclopédie. To be a bluestocking in the best French nylons dressed and perfumed by Chanel and with the reddest of shimmering lipsticks. In other words to be completely false to her upbringing and therefore in all probability her own inherent nature. But that would require deep excavations and she was not quite ready for that.

So she called Capstick and went round to see him for a bit of chat. She wanted to tell him about the piece she delivered at the School. She’d never heard of the Emperor Maximilian (great name though) and much of the rest of the thing was down to Brian as well. But she found him in a serious mood and not just didactically, although he continued to pursue another line of his that, to be modern, art did not need to be contemporary. He talked of Durer and Velazquez and Valerie was genuinely interested.

To be honest though Brian Capstick was rather regretting encouraging Valerie to be a smartarse at the Finishing School. He wanted to put her right about ambition. Yes in general he said ambition was a good thing. Even those ambitions that were unlikely to bear fruit. There had been a time in his life he said when he got a hankering to write film scripts. But though they were much easier to write than novels, they were more difficult to make money from. But what you had to do with ambition he stressed was to try ones darndest. Then when it comes to the reckoning, not before some unlikely god, but later in life from s/he who is the most critical of all. If you can at that point tell yourself in all honesty that you have done everything feasible in realising your ambition then you have nothing to reproach yourself with. And Valerie listened.

He had not finished. Family and loved ones were important, more so than some airy fairy career move or extravagant hobby. And remember, being extravagant with time can be the worst of all. There are ways around the rest. A new job, or even more so a promotion with your present employers, is not to be sniffed at. If the figures pan out, the accommodation and the travel, move with the work. Find digs for the week and go back to the wife (or husband of course) and bairns of a weekend. Nothing lasts forever. And for a time parents must take a back seat. So try not to disrupt your children’s education which means more than a school it means friendships disrupted as well. On the other hand try not to let well-meaning fathers thwart your ambtions by insisting you work in the family business (and on occasions they insist the precise opposite)

Now Valerie was getting bored. What did all this have to do with her? Sometimes she felt she was just being used as a mute and admiring audience for whatever was buzzing around in the man’s restless brain. Her mind started to wander. To he who was HER mute and admiring audience. She made her excuses and left for Dave’s place. She found him as bovine as ever with a small radio on in the corner. And she went about massaging her ego. She felt that Brian had been accusing her of something, putting her to rights, and she did not like it. Waxing lyrical about Velazquez and reciting the opening poem of Nabokov’s Pale Fire (heard on the previous occasion at Brian’s) helped but only for a while.

Now is the shadow of the waxwing slain

By the false azure of the window pane.

She began to realise that too many things were boring her, and that her ambitions were just a form of egotism. She wanted proper relationships, and she wasn’t getting one from any of these four men. He needed goading, this flabby young fellow.

“So what do you think of Nabokov?”

“I don’t really know enough about him”

“Or life. What do you think of life? No I suppose you don’t know enough about that either”

“Well…”

“Well? Well, well, well”

Dave Mitchell stared at her, an asinine grin on his face.

For one strange moment she felt motherly, then she felt guilty

“I am a naughty girl aren’t I”, she said “You ought to smack my bottom”.

Not for one moment did she think he would act on her rather mocking suggestion so she also hadn’t decided how she would deal with things if he did. But something had lit a spark some combination of those statements…

“I agree with both of those propositions” he said pompously.

And he took hold of her, dragged her to a chair and turned her over his knee. He delivered two stinging spanks before she broke free.

“Stop it! That hurt!”

Four little words, admittedly shouted, were enough to put Dave Mitchell back into default mode. That was not quite how things should have developed she felt. Valerie needed something to happen. And it did. For the first time she became fully aware of the radio.

“This is the BBC Home Service. Here is the News.”

It sounded so portentous breaking the silence.

“A British man has been arrested for espionage in East Berlin. His name is given as Richard Romaine”

Towser!

“I’ve gotta go, Dave”, she said. And that’s exactly what she did.

Valerie tended to be least enthusiastic about the men in her life she had seen most recently. Capstick and Mitchell were yesterday’s men. There was something symbiotic about them. Capstick’s rather arbitrary bits of knowledge passed through her, the conduit, to be delivered pompously to Mitchell. A silly game, Valerie, she said to herself, time to take down the dusty Book of Ambition and start again. But she was genuinely concerned about Towser and conceived a rather impractical plan to visit Berlin. But how?

******************************

“How were the Maldives, Tim”

“All right”

She asked no more about him.

“I need some money”

“Right now I’m broke, Val.”

“You can’t be. You just put down a deposit on that furniture at Harrods.”

“Just the deposit”

“You were going to get the stuff from the depository when you got back. I saw you put the money into your safe.”

He sighed.

“Please lend me some of it”

For all his faults, and there were many, Beauregard was fond of Valerie, and he hated to disappoint her. Perhaps he was touched that of the four of them, and he knew all about all the others, she had chosen to take his name. Then again he knew she just liked the ring of it. After all so did he. HIS real name was Judd. So he gave her some money.

Valerie went to a travel agent and tried to buy a ticket. She was asked to wait in a side room. She waited a long time. Then two police officers came in and arrested her for trying to pass forged currency.

She later broke down before the Probation Officer assigned to her case.

“Everything’s in ruins”, she wailed “My whole life. I need to reset the clock but you’re not allowed to. I want to start life afresh. Do only good, to myself as well as to other people. I can change, I really can.”

She went on like that for quite a while. The probation officer, a worldly enough woman, was quite impressed, and Valerie’s last question did little to gainsay that impression.

“Should I cry in the dock?”

***********************

“This is a record” said the older of the two nurses “We have never had so many visitors for one resident.

“I didn’t think it was allowed”

“We couldn’t really say no”, said the other “Five children, seventeen grand children. People from her companies, all the housing charities, the advice bureaux. Everybody adores her and she hasn’t long left with us. I doubt she’s ever done a bad thing in her life. She wanted to be a legal aid solicitor as well, helping criminals who had danced on the right side. But she was unable to. I don’t know why.”

A third nurse burst in with a paper she was signing.

“What’s the date today?”

“3rd October 2025”.