No! I Don't Want to Join a Book Club: Diary of a Sixtieth Year (11 page)

Then, looking down at me, he suddenly asked: “What have you got on your feet?”

I explained that once I’d got out of the blue flip-flops I had to wear sensible shoes for a few weeks and had got rather addicted to them. Sensible shoes from Ecco, no less. There’s a funny moment when you’re sixty and thinking about shoes, when someone (everyone, in fact) suddenly reveals there is a special shop for old people’s comfortable shoes. It sounds glamorous—Ecco. Ecco! Behold! But rather than continuing with the theme: “Ecco! Da beautifulla shoes for the lovely matura ladya! Flattera your beautifulla feeta!,” the words following Ecco should, in my view, run: “Ecco! Atta lasta! The hideousa but comfortaballa shoesa for the olda batsa!”

“They’re delightful,” he said gallantly. “I do hope you can walk, though. Would you like me to hire a wheelchair? It might be rather fun…Then you could be at the level of the captions and near enough to read them out to me—very loudly, of course—and we wouldn’t have to get the big print version of the catalog for oldies with fading sight.”

On our way out we saw a big man’s black hat lying in the corridor. “Oh dear, I saw the owner of that hat earlier on,” said Hughie.

“Show me a man in a big hat and I’ll show you a cunt,” I said. It’s a joke Penny told me.

“Marie!” said Hughie, shocked but unable, despite himself, not to laugh.

We both imagined this wretched man going around pompously, imagining he’d got his ludicrous hat on his head, and then going home and looking in the mirror and finding to his horror that he’d been strutting around all day just an ordinary person with a small, bald head.

Hughie bought me a scrummy lunch in the restaurant, which was fearfully expensive but it was good because over the saddle of hare (oh, dear, too yummy, poor old hare) I was able to bring up the difficult subject again.

“Now, what did the doctor say about that ghastly cough?” I asked in a no-nonsense kind of way. Hughie’d been coughing his head off all the way round the exhibition, narrowly avoiding exploding all over Turner’s
Thames Above Waterloo Bridge.

He looked at me slyly. “I think you know I haven’t been,” he said. “You’ve been talking to James, I can hear it in your voice.”

“I have absolutely
not
been talking to James,” I said. “I swear on my mother’s grave. And what’s James got to do with this, anyway? Is James worried too?” I said. When I lie, though, I say it myself, I lie well. Anyway, my mother, like Hughie’s, was cremated. So ha!

Hughie looked rather uneasy. “Yes, yes, I must go to the doctor,” he said. “I know. And I will. I’m just putting it off, but I will, I promise.”

“You’re not one of those ludicrous men who’s frightened of going to the doctor, Hughie?” I said. “Please don’t tell me you are. I’d lose all respect for you.”

Hughie grimaced. “Stop it, Marie. Don’t use cheap tricks on me. I will go.”

“I don’t believe you,” I said. “I can see it in your eyes. They’ve kind of clouded over as if someone’s drawn a piece of cheesecloth over them.”

He laughed, then paused, thinking.

“I’ll tell you why I don’t go, Marie,” he said eventually. “If I’ve got cancer or something—and I frankly don’t care if I have—I’ve lived long enough. Sixty-five isn’t a bad age, quite honestly, and I’ve still got all my faculties. But if I have got something sinister, I’ll have to start having all that chemotherapy, last strand of hair falling out, feeling utterly wretched, James in floods of tears, you wringing your hands. I’ve got better things to do with the end of my life than lie in hospital on eight hundred drips, a living corpse surrounded by people discussing whether I’m well enough to have a lung transplant. It’s not the doctor I’m frightened of. Or the diagnosis of cancer—which is probable, as I’ve smoked for fifty years now. It’s the curative treatment that scares me. Or, most likely, the noncurative treatment. All that hoo-ha.”

“But it might be just a chest infection,” I said. “Which could be cured by a few antibiotics. Who says you’ve got cancer? You’re letting your imagination run away with you! You could always say no to treatment anyway, if it was.”

“Don’t talk nonsense,” he said rather brusquely. The waiter arrived with a second bottle of wine, which Hughie sampled before nodding. “How could I say no? The pressure on me would be unbearable.”

It struck me again, the difference between us because of our ages. Hughie was brought up in an era of public schools, the army and distant parents, and as a result has this totally inappropriate respect for authority. He could no more say to his doctor that he didn’t want any treatment for whatever it was, than fly.

“That’s true,” I said. “I do understand.” And I did. Understanding people is rather like lying. You simply have to believe you understand a person’s point of view—and I really thought I did—in order for a declaration of understanding to be accepted as true. I scrabbled around in my brain for something—just something—that might push him into going to the doctor.

“But I think there is one factor you haven’t taken into account,” I said, hit by a brain wave. “Your cough is very public. If you were suffering some kind of internal private symptom that you could shield from people like James and me, fine. Bleeding stools. Stomach cramps. Mad voices in your head telling you to kill everyone. None of us would be any the wiser. And I’d understand your point of view. But, Hughie, this cough is so public. Every time you cough I bet James is just suffering agonies. He must experience, if this morning is anything to go by, about 150 knife wounds of anxiety per day. Either stop coughing,” I concluded sternly, “or get it checked out.”

It’s rare that I hit the spot with Hughie, but I could see he was listening to me and absorbing what I’d said. You can always persuade rational people to do anything, as long as you have the logic ready. Terrible really. Emotional people are far less easy to win round.

There was a long pause.

“I hadn’t thought of it like that,” he said. He coughed again. I mimed a stabbing motion into my heart.

“OK, OK, OK,” he said. There was another pause. He pushed his plate away and coughed again. He then held his forehead in his hands, thinking. Finally, he rummaged in his pocket and brought out his mobile phone and his address book and started dialing.

There was a pause while it rang. Then he said: “Dr. Evans’s surgery? It’s Hughie Passton here. I want to make an appointment. Yes. Yes. Fine. Nine o’clock. Next Thursday. I’ll be there.”

He put his phone away and I felt my eyes filling with tears. I don’t really know why. Perhaps it was something to do with wondering if he was dying, but I think, rather, that it was to do with having made a connection with someone else at such a deep level. It seemed to be something to do with love, but I couldn’t quite define it.

Hughie put his fingers to his mouth and blew me a kiss.

“Now can we change the subject?” he said, pouring me out a glass of red. “Can we have some pudding? Can we—oh!” he said, looking over my shoulder. “I wonder what’s going on over there! I think I see Penny and it looks as if she’s having lunch with someone
most
unsuitable!”

I turned and there, sitting in front of the
Whistler
mural, between a fawn and a small painted bridge, was Penny, deep in conversation with a bloke I had never seen before. His back was to us, but as far as I could see he had red hair. And then he turned slightly to reveal—yes, a beard! How could she! Do hope she won’t fall in love with him and put off our weekend in France.

The Underground was working when I finally made the journey home. By the way, who on earth ever buys or eats those repulsive grilled nuts covered with sugar that they sell at stations? Are they a cover for something? Like those sinister nail salons? Do hope Maciej’s girlfriend isn’t a member of the mafia.

June 1

Turns out that Michelle does. Eat those nuts, I mean. I caught her nibbling from a bag in the kitchen, at the same time as she was poring over all the so-called healthy food she has stored in the fridge. Funny how people who are into health foods, soy milk, organic bread and fresh juices, so often go mad and break out into the most revolting food imaginable. I once caught Marion guiltily eating an unspeakable raspberry ripple from Iceland. And she has the nerve to say I’m not a healthy eater! I may buy creepy identically shaped vegetables from Tesco occasionally, but I’d never eat a raspberry ripple if you paid me.

June 4th

Last-minute plans from Penny about our trip to France. But as my computer seemed to have crashed I had to go round to Lucy’s to look at the options that Penny had sent me. Luckily she’s working in London this week.

Lucy asked me, rather oddly, I thought, whether I had broad beans. I said that no I hadn’t and wasn’t it a bit early for them, anyway? Turned out she’d asked me whether I’d got broadband.

June 12

Three slight problems with the journey to France.

One was that you are compelled, now, to check in by yourself. It was bad enough, quite honestly, booking tickets online. I can’t see what’s wrong with people doing the work for you. They get a job and I get an easier life. But now you have to be your own travel agent, instead of having someone do up your itinerary in a nice little plastic folder and give it to you with the words “Have a lovely holiday!”

To have to check yourself in as well was a bit much.

I noticed some kind of official hovering about, and continued to goggle at the self-check-in machine helplessly.

“How does this work?” I asked him. I could tell, already, that he was trained not to do it for you. He pointed to various buttons and I then declared that as I hadn’t got the right glasses on (total lie) I couldn’t see which buttons he was pointing to. I was, I explained cunningly, very
old.
In the end he had to do it all for me and I felt totally victorious. Why
should
I check myself in? Soon supermarkets will be forcing you to make your own ready-made meals.

I paid for all this, of course, by appearing to be a fool, but it was a payment I was delighted to make. Because one of the great pleasures of age is helplessness. If my tire blew on the motorway, I wouldn’t, now, lose any pride in flagging down a bloke to help me. The days of struggling with a jack and a handbook, with one’s hands covered in oil, just to prove something, are completely over.

Penny checked herself in with no problem at all and I think rather disapproved of my scam.

Another blight was that going down the corridor to the departure gate (I was reeking, as usual, of about a dozen scents I’d squirted on myself in the Duty Free) an Italian girl asked me if this was the way to Turin. I couldn’t help her, but did rather wonder why she’d asked me rather than Penny—or someone else. Was it because I looked Italian, too? I preened myself. So chic! Or was it because I looked old and therefore safe? Again, I felt a maternal glow coming over me. But then I caught sight of myself in the reflection in the glass that divides the white drained people from the healthy bronzed people, walking in the other direction, and discovered the reason I’d been targeted. In my black stockings, black flat shoes and long gray jacket, I looked just like a gloomy old Italian widow, rather a different kettle of fish.

Third problem was that sitting next to me on the plane was a man with a very black beard who read the Quran to himself in a low mutter all the way there, making me sick with anxiety. I tried to smile at him in my “Hey, I’m just a harmless old sixty-year-old!” way, but no response, just a glare.

Only plus was that at least none of the loos had been modernized at the airports. At Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, you go in, sit down normally, then stand up and then you just can’t find anywhere to flush the loo. So, being a decent middle-class human being, you try to pull a couple of sheets of loo paper from the inexplicably heavy loo-paper machine, and lay them neatly over whatever you’ve done, and leave, expecting to murmur apologetically to the next person in line that the loo doesn’t flush. Only to find that, as you open the door to leave the loo, it explodes into a huge flushing
all by itself.

I do think modern technology has gone too far when you can’t even flush away your own poo.

Anyway, we checked into a funny little hotel in Nice—totally unchanged since when I’d been there with my mother in the fifties—plonked down our bags and went down to have dinner.

“Now, I want to ask you a question,” I said, after I’d ordered my bouillabaisse and
boeuf grillé.
We ate in one of those typically French dining rooms, full of thick-leaved plants in brass pots, with oak tables covered with plastic tablecloths, and big paper napkins with dolphins on them. “You’re not, by any chance, Internet dating are you?”

Penny’s eyes popped out of her head. “Do you have second sight?” she asked. “I didn’t tell you one day, did I?”

“You said you were thinking about it,” I said. “You didn’t say you’d started, though.”

“Does it
show
?” she asked.

“It’s simply that you’ve been looking rather anxious recently. And I have to admit, I did see you at the Tate with a most peculiar-looking man who just couldn’t have been a friend.”