No! I Don't Want to Join a Book Club: Diary of a Sixtieth Year (8 page)

I assured her that I’d been complaining about the rubbish left on my street from about the age of forty. But, of course, living in Shepherds Bush it’s difficult not to complain about the rubbish because often it is hard to get out of one’s front door for the piles of old fast-food cartons, chicken bones, half-drunk Special Brew cans, broken television sets, mattresses, bags of what look like dead babies, oozing car batteries and old sofas that clog up the pavements.

Feb 8

I am plagued with spam. I think it’s because someone once sent me an all-singing, all-dancing birthday card via some company in the States and now I am deluged with ads for Viagra and penis enhancement, not to mention desperate requests for money from Nigerians. This is the latest, which I rather liked:

Minister Charles Simpson has the power to make you a
LEGALLY ORDAINED MINISTER within forty-eight hours!

WEDDINGS

MARRY your BROTHER, SISTER, or your BEST FRIEND!

Don’t settle for being the BEST MAN OR BRIDESMAID

FUNERALS

A very hard time for you and your family

Don’t settle for a minister you don’t know!

BAPTISMS

You can say “WELCOME TO THE WORLD! I AM YOUR
MINISTER AND YOUR UNCLE!”

What a special way to welcome a child of God

WANT TO START YOUR OWN CHURCH??

After your LEGAL ORDINATION, you may start your own
congregation!

For this you will receive:

1. 8-inch by 10-inch certificate in color, with gold seal (Certificate professionally printed by an ink press)
   
2. Proof of Minister Certification in your name
   
3. Shipping is free
   

How about getting a certificate and then, during the christening of this little person, suddenly bursting out with: “Welcome to the world! I am your minister and your grandmother!”

Perhaps not.

Feb 19

Went to optician’s. At sixty, I now have free eye tests—brilliant!—but rather irritatingly, being sixty, my sight barely changes (except at night and in front of the computer). So just at the time you don’t need them, you get them for nothing. Typical. When I arrived, the man behind the counter, the nephew of Mr. Ahmed, who runs the shop, was complaining about the smell of drains. As far as I could make out, the manhole for the drains for the entire block of flats above opens in the basement of the optician’s. Mr. Ahmed himself came up looking very peeved, rubbing his hand as if he’d had a nasty encounter with a piece of slime, or worse, down there.

He tested my eyes and told me that my sight hadn’t changed at all—but, he revealed gleefully, he could see cataracts growing already. He gave me the news as if he’d spotted the first crocuses coming up in spring. I felt a bit depressed. Then I got cross, because if my sight hasn’t changed, why can’t I see?

I’ve never been really able to see with my present glasses. I can’t see the words on my computer screen unless I crane my neck right back. I have tried sitting on piles of cushions, so the computer is lower than me. I have tried putting dozens of ancient Victorian volumes of
Punch
underneath the monitor to raise it, but nothing makes any difference. Mr. Ahmed says the problem could be one of two things. First, it could be floaters. Certainly, so many dark floaty shapes pass my eyes I sometimes feel as if I am walking through an autumn forest in a storm. Or, more likely, it could be that the line of midvision is bad because of the fashionably tiny glasses I have.

Mr. Ahmed and his nephew stared at my line of vision, made marks with a special pen on my glasses, garbled optical jargon to each other and finally said that if I were to pay £575 for a new pair I would be able to see perfectly well. I gulped. No reaction. Then I gulped again, more loudly. Nothing. Finally I said: “Golly, that’s
frightfully
expensive!” and got a result.

“For you, £500,” said Mr. Ahmed’s nephew.

It is still “Cripes!”, however much money they take off.

When I left I had a sudden thought: Could the smell in the drains be due to all the old cataracts they flush down them? Yuk.

I then went to Sainsbury’s to buy some fish, and some special food they do that Pouncer likes. At least, he liked it last week. It’s funny with cats. They’ll refuse to eat anything but Whiskas Turkey in Gravy for about three months and then, just as you buy a whole crate of it wholesale, they’ll suddenly turn up their nose at it and eat nothing but Sainsbury’s Select Cuts of Chicken and Tuna.

A fat man in front of me in the queue was wearing a T-shirt on which was written the word: WHATEVER.

Later

When I got back James rang to tell me that his aunt Jane—yes, the “very grown-up” one—has gone into a home, kicking and screaming at first but not for long because apparently the place is stuffed with what he calls “wingcos,” slang for “Wing Commanders.” Even if the blokes in question have lost every single marble they ever had, Jane, who retains only about half a marble, is still galvanized and rejuvenated simply by the presence of a man. Exactly, in fact, like me. Funny that. I have no interest in men at all these days on the sexual front, thank God, but I can still get flattered out of my tree by a man, any old man, turning his eyes onto me and twinkling and flirting.

Asked Hughie round for a drink to help me with the DVD—not that he knows anything about such things but I thought he could read the instructions out to me while I followed them. More important, I wanted to tackle his cough. He dropped by but, instead of looking five years older than me, which he is, he looked pretty washed-up, more like someone of my father’s age in his final days.

“Are you losing weight, Hughie?” I asked, when I let him in. “You’re not looking quite as…er…well-covered as you were the last time I saw you.”

“Well-covered! What a word,” said Hughie. As he came in he coughed, which was lucky because if for some reason he hadn’t coughed I would have been up a gum tree. “Doesn’t everything look lovely?” he said, admiring the room as he sat down. “You’re so lucky to have Maciej. He’s so good-looking, too. James and I have to put up with a terrible old duck called Lilian who does nothing but call in sick.”

We tried to work the DVD but drew a blank. It involves something called a scart plug, and whenever I hear those words my brain goes kind of dead. I don’t know what a scart plug is and I never will. When I rang Jack, he told me it was a fat thing full of prickles, so I then had a vague idea of what it looks like and he told me that we had stored several of these in his old room upstairs.

“Mum, you’ve got dozens of scart plugs,” he said. “In that chest. In my old room.”

I thought about it. Jack’s old room was now lived in by Michelle. I could just imagine the daunting piles of CDs, beauty products, DVDs, plastic bags and castoff handbags that Michelle would have stuffed on top of my assorted collection of wires. So I thought that enough was enough for that evening. I’d got the DVD player out of its box, and that was scary enough. I will tackle the scart situation tomorrow.

In the meantime, it was easy to tackle Hughie about the doctor, since he coughed all the time.

“Hughie, what are you going to do about that cough?” I said. “It’s terrible. Have you seen the doctor?”

“No,” he said, “but you’re right. I must. James keeps nagging me. I’ll make an appointment tomorrow. I swear on my mother’s grave.”

“Your mother was cremated. She doesn’t have a grave,” I said, Sherlock Holmes–like in my eagerness to stop up all the loopholes that Hughie might use to avoid seeing the doctor.

“So she was,” said Hughie. “But I will. I’ve got to get it sorted out.”

But I had a very strong feeling that he wouldn’t do anything about it at all. He looked like a man who was deceiving himself. However, I couldn’t press him any further, so I left it at that.

March 4

A late birthday lunch with Archie at a restaurant called Pulli in fashionable Clerkenwell. It was very nice of him to organize it, because he must still be feeling pretty grim after Philippa’s death. It was only six months ago, too. I imagined him thinking: “Why should I be celebrating Marie’s birthday when poor old Philippa never even got to sixty?” That’s how my mind would work, anyway. But Archie’s probably too nice to think like that.

He is wonderfully self-effacing. The message on my answering machine to invite me for lunch, went: “Could you
bear
to give me a ring if the idea of having lunch with me isn’t absolute
anathema
to you?” When he rang to make the date, he’d said: “Let’s meet on Thursday—if we live that long…”

God knows how Archie booked a table, because Pulli is a restaurant in which you have to kill to get one, but no doubt he tips like a trooper. (Do troopers tip? Or do they swear?)

I must say that catching sight of him waiting outside the restaurant did rather make my heart lurch. I know lots of people adore chunky blokes in vests or simmering young Italians with tumbling black curly hair, but for me the sight of a tall, svelte, middle-aged Englishman wearing a long, well-cut tailored coat open down the front, standing in a London street, is something to capture my heart—if my heart were capturable, that is.

When he was my First Love (though he never knew it then and still doesn’t now, thank goodness), he can’t have been more than fifteen, and I’d met him at a bottle party I’d gate-crashed. Nightly I would walk past his parents’ house in Chelsea and stare in at the lighted window, wondering if he were inside. And yet, as I sat down at the table, it seemed quite extraordinary that my two roles could exist in a single lifetime. Once, when I was sixteen, shy, terrified, miserable, I used to crawl by his window like a stalker—and now, nearly fifty years later, I was sitting with him in a Clerkenwell restaurant, confident and relaxed with no designs on him at all, and simply deriving pleasure from being in his nice company for lunch. How wonderful not to be driven by a longing for company and sex.

“Would you mind passing me the menu if it isn’t the most
frightful
bore?” he said to me. Then: “Oh, how
splendid!
” to the waiter when he brought the sparkling water. “How
frightfully
kind!”

Obviously I’d written to him when Philippa had died, but I felt I had to acknowledge her death again, couldn’t really avoid it after all, and he said, in that rather sweet way that some men have when talking about something that really matters to them but they don’t want to show it: “Yes, absolutely
rotten
luck, wasn’t it? Still makes me blub now and again.”

Anyway, the dishes were incredibly expensive and I felt very guilty ordering one veal sweetbread in mushroom sauce and some polenta because it cost about £21. Archie ordered lobster and black pudding cappuccino, and the waiter said: “Eez that all? Here we advise our clients to order at least three portions each.”

When the food arrived, mine was a sweetbread the size of a thumbnail with what looked like three sliced beansprouts and one chopped-up button mushroom in a teaspoon of sauce—all served on
a piece of slate
! Archie’s lobster and black pudding cappuccino was a tiny bowl like a children’s tea set cup, half-filled with broth.

Over lunch we naturally talked of old age. Our first topic was the fact that everyone we know is dropping like flies.

“Yes, we’re getting to the difficult age,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, when I look in the obituary columns, it seems that everyone’s either between fifty-eight and sixty-five or between eighty and ninety,” he said. “Poor Philippa was fifty-nine, when you think of it. I believe that if we can get through these next few years, we’re probably in for a long stretch.”

“You mean like in the Grand National, getting over Butcher’s Leap or whatever it is?”

“Exactly! How
frightfully
well you put it!”

Of course we got on to the subject of retiring as well, and he revealed that he had started to lose his nerve when it came to investing huge sums of money or whatever he does. And I agreed. When I’ve occasionally done the odd bit of supply teaching recently, a task that I would usually take in my stride, I feel all wobbly. I know how an acrobat must feel when she reaches thirty. OK, she’s leapt into the air thousands of times since she was sixteen, but suddenly it’s scary.

“But we should get
less
frightened as we get older, not
more
frightened,” I said. And indeed one of the brilliant things about old age is the ludicrous confidence that it bestows.

“I think we’re like old stags, frightened by new young bucks coming up with great antlers,” he said.

“I don’t feel like an old stag,” I said. I was wearing a very nice Vivienne Westwood top, which I got in a sale, and high-heeled boots, and thought I looked rather glam.