No! I Don’t Need Reading Glasses! (2 page)

Sometimes I think we actually turn into a different shape when we're single. From our edges being all bumps and dips while we were searching for a partner, and constantly looking for another piece of a jigsaw puzzle to fit into, we become smooth and round and self-contained. And much less capable of slotting neatly into someone else's personality. Unless, of course, they have a personality like a great round vacuum which is, of course, not a very attractive personality in any case. But Archie and I often spend weekends together. He comes up to my Edwardian terraced house in Shepherd's Bush in London, or I go down to Devon – always packing my electric blanket, and wearing my special Heat-Tech underwear from UniGlo on top of a silk vest and pair of under-leggings,
and
woolly knickers.

Unlike me, Archie has lots of money, but like a lot of grand country people really hates spending it on anything
as decadent as heating. So you go into his vast and gloomy stone kitchen and it's awash with all the latest gadgets, and spotless slate worktops, and the bedrooms all have swagged chintz curtains (albeit hanging by a thread), but the actual house is perishing. Indeed, if I ever find myself doing the cooking down there, I wear a hat and a scarf and my overcoat, and I once cut down a pair of woollen gloves to make mittens to wear indoors. Sometimes I even put the oven on and leave it open, just to get a bit more heat. And I'm such a naturally cold-blooded person that the temperature only has to be one degree under freezing that, if I shield a sneeze from others by covering my face, I need a kettle of boiling water to provide enough steam to prise my frosty fingers from my icy nose. I have about as much circulation as an inland lake.

I should take up knitting, but after the huge effort of making Gene, my grandson, a pair of tiny socks on four needles, when he was born, I don't think I could ever wind a piece of wool round another pair of needles again. So
complicated!

So, there's been no diary-writing for a time, anyway. After all, one keeps a diary not only for comfort but also in the weird hope that someone might come across it hundreds of years later and one might be heralded as the new Mr Pepys, though whether old computer files will last till another century is another matter. Perhaps I should get a quill pen and start writing this by hand rather than banging away on my laptop. Jack gave me this thing for Christmas,
in an effort to drag his poor old mum into what I still call the twentieth century – though of course it is now the twenty-first. And I am determined to get the hang of it, even though the keyboard appears to be made for people with very tiny fingers, like goblins. Secretly I rather prefer the cranky old computer I have in my workroom.

Anyway, back to the diary. It's a place you can write all the stuff you can't tell your friends, where you can go over the top or be really mean about your nearest and dearest without hurting them. It's a good pal, or a chum as we used to say when I was a girl, which now seems like millions of years ago though actually I was ten in 1957. And a pal or chum is what I'm starting to need now that things aren't quite as – well, how can I put it? – quite as superlatively brilliant as they were when I was sixty. And because, while I'm still delighted not to be young and believe I'm happier now than I've ever been, things haven't worked out in quite the ecstatic way I was hoping for at the end of my sixtieth year.

What do they say now instead of ‘chums' or ‘pals'? Mates? Guys? I've got a friend who, when she sees me with someone else, even with another woman, always shouts ‘Hi, you guys!' It always makes me feel a bit peculiar, as if I might have suddenly sprouted a moustache or gone bald in the last five minutes.

Now, why am I not as all-singing and all-dancing as I was? For one thing, I'm now nearly sixty-five – in only a couple of weeks in fact – which is rather nearer seventy than it
was before. I've certainly ratcheted down a couple of notches. (When you're older, and you suffer some great blow like a major operation or even a very severe dose of flu, you never quite get back to where you started. It's a kind of ten steps back and only nine steps forward situation.) The other day I caught myself talking to myself. Actually, I never realised quite what an interesting person I was until this started. But still … In a way it's quite a good thing, this encroaching loopiness. I never used to exercise, but now my heart is constantly getting a work-out just by racing round the house looking for my glasses or panicking that I've left my bath running.

The main problem has been Archie. About two years ago, I realised that Archie was actually starting to behave rather oddly. It began with him forgetting my name. We laughed it off as a senior moment, but then I noticed a bit of paper on his desk one day on which he'd made a list of the names of all the characters he knew: Hardy (his dog), James (our mutual friend), Philippa (his late wife), Harry (his son-in-law), Mrs Evans (his cleaner), Marie (that's me), Sylvie (his daughter), Gene (my grandson), Jack (my son). David (my ex). It looked suspiciously like a reminder list. I was also slightly miffed, to be honest, to see that I was so far down. And the other thing was that his writing looked peculiar. Not quite as strong as it used to be. A bit wiggly. Or, to be
really
honest, shaky. Jolly important as you age to keep your handwriting strong and certain. Before I write anything these days I always take a deep breath to make sure my elegant italic looks full
of purpose and intent. You don't want it looking all quavery. Dead giveaway.

The next thing Archie did that struck a note of deep anxiety was to buy a very rare and expensive new rosebush for his garden and become furious when it died. First he'd been convinced that Hardy had peed on it, but just before he fired off an enraged letter to the company which had supplied it, I passed it in the garden and noticed a bit of polythene poking up through the earth around the base of the dead bush. I could see at once what the problem was. He'd planted it with the polythene packaging still on! Was that the act of a man in full possession of all his marbles? I don't think so. This was a man who used to win prizes for his roses; a man who was so scrupulous about his gardening that he actually used to double-dig, and anyone who's done that knows this is serious stuff.

And since the rose bush episode I've been noticing other heartbreaking things about him. For instance, after a day out shopping recently, he came back to my house wearing a brand-new loden coat. Now many people wouldn't think anything of anyone buying a loden coat. I mean why not? Very warm and green and full. But I understand Archie well enough to know that he's not a loden coat-man. Only certain men like loden coats. And Archie isn't one of them. He's a hairy-old-fishing-coat-from-Savile-Row sort of person. He doesn't possess a jacket that hasn't got leather patches sewn onto the elbows. Indeed, it's quite unlike him to buy anything new
at all
, being of a generation, like myself, which finds
forking out for a new anything rather extravagant, particularly if we have some old rag hanging in the cupboard that can be repaired instead. I've been known to dig out the sticky remains of my lipstick from its little tube with a pin, and then smear it on my lips with my fingers, rather than go out and get a new one. And I'll never
ever
throw a chicken carcass away. I devil the legs, boil up the bones for stock, and once managed to eke out a bird for ten days. It's the spirit of austerity that still clings on from childhood. Make do and mend.

When Jack stayed the other night, just before Christmas – he was on his way back from a trip to New York and his car conked out in Shepherd's Bush before he could get home so he spent his jet-lagged night with his ma – he said in the morning that he'd slept fine except that there had been a rather uncomfortable ridge down the middle of the bottom sheet. I told that him that it was because in some ghastly recession in the seventies, I decided to resort to an old wartime habit of my mother's when the centre of the sheet was worn, and I'd cut it in two, swapped the sides around and resewn it. My son gave a snort, partly of laughter and partly of disgust.

‘Mum!' he said. ‘You may be broke, but for heaven's sake, you can surely afford new sheets! Go down the market, it'll only be a tenner! I've now got a red line down the middle of my back that will take days to disappear! What will Chrissie think I've been up to?'

But I digress. Back to Archie's loden coat.

‘That's very nice!' I said, lying my head off, when he showed it to me – it was one of his weekends in London with me and he'd been to a sale in Regent Street. The coat was billiardtable green, with narrow leathery binding round the collar, a thin chain instead of a top button, and it had a split in the back with a bit more material in the pleat so that it swung out when he walked. It featured small buttons in the shapes of tiny barrels and, worst of all, there were two Sherlock Holmes-type flaps across the shoulders. Funny, those flaps. However tall a man is, those flaps always take about a foot off his height. The problem was that there was far too much material involved. The coat was slightly too long for Archie – even the sleeves – and he looked like a mixture of a small Hollywood millionaire and an insect, the big sort you find in rainforests. Not a good look.

‘Do you like it?' asked Archie, attempting an unsuccessful twirl. ‘I thought it had a kind of Alpine chic.'

‘It certainly does,' I replied, though what Alpine chic is I have no idea, except that it obviously must involve a lot of layers and thick material not only to keep you warm but also to cushion you when you fall on your bottom in the snow. And why would Archie want Alpine chic when he appears to be impervious to cold? Perhaps even he was starting to realise how freezing it was inside his house. Perhaps he was planning to wear the coat for cooking in.

Anyway, he wore this wretched coat all the time, even in the house, while he stayed with me. And just before he left for Devon, he said to me, ‘I love this coat! I thought I'd grow
a beard to go with it!' As he said this, he gave the strangest laugh I've ever heard. And then I knew that something was deeply wrong and a cold shiver went down my spine. I mean, I've heard Archie on the subject of beards. ‘The only gentlemen who ever looked good in a beard were George V and Edward VII,' he said once. ‘A beard is the sign of a weak man or a
scoundrel
.'

So I'm very worried.

I've been looking at the Christmas tree in my sitting room, and roll on Twelfth Night, I say. It just looks a bit sad standing there, its job over, and with all the presents gone from beneath it. Also the room, which is quite small and cosy, needs good lighting, and the tree, despite its fairy lights, doesn't give off quite enough. Maybe I'll just take it down anyway. Can't bear to tell anyone, but last year was the first time I bought a false tree. I just couldn't face sweeping up the needles for months on end.
And no one noticed!
Of course it didn't smell the same, but Christmas trees have stopped smelling like Christmas trees years ago. Or is it just my failing nose? False trees are brilliant. After you've used them, you just fold them up like an umbrella and bung them in the back of a cupboard till next year.

This morning I rang my dear old friend Penny, round the corner. While we were gossiping, I brought up the subject of Archie's coat.

‘I'm really worried,' I said. ‘Archie's forgotten my name, planted a rosebush in its bag, bought a loden coat and now he says he wants to grow a beard. I think he's getting Alzheimer's.'

Penny was very scathing. ‘You always look on the black side,' she said. ‘For heaven's sake, we all forget names! And why shouldn't the man buy a new coat? And as for a beard, he's probably fed up with shaving! That's the reason most men grow beards. Can't be fagged to get out the old lather and strop.'

‘But he's got an electric shaver!' I protested.

‘Oh, don't be so stupid, Marie,' said Penny dismissively. ‘Archie's one of the brightest oldies I know. Alzheimer's! Tosh! Honestly, you're so picky, and sensitive.
You're
the one who's getting Alzheimer's. You know paranoia is one of the first symptoms. Anyway,' she added, just to make everything worse, ‘you've never been able to bear people wearing things you don't like. You're such a control freak.'

Now, if there's one thing that makes me hopping mad, it's people telling me I'm a control freak. Particularly shambolic, utterly hopeless, untidy and so-called ‘spontaneous' people like Penny. Just because her life's a mess and mine is a meticulously filed set of folders in alphabetical order, she accuses me of being a control freak. Naturally I do not see myself as a control freak. I see myself as someone who has got their act together and remembers people's birthdays and gets the trees in the garden lopped every five years, has all her skirts and dresses arranged in different sections
in her wardrobe, has working smoke alarms in every room and who always at Christmas gives the dustmen, the newspaper boy and the milkman cards with ten-pound notes inside them.
And
who remembers their names, I might add. Unlike some, i.e. Penny, who is always surprised when the dustmen chuck all her rubbish over her front garden ‘by mistake' because she's forgotten to tip them again.

Now Twelfth Night's well and truly over, the sitting room's all back to normal again and not a Christmas tree, paper chain or card in sight. Took me about an hour to erase all evidence of Christmas from the place, and I nearly fell off the ladder as I was dismantling some holly lights, but what a relief it's all over. Looking through my cards as I swept them from the mantelpiece, I found a very odd one from someone which read, ‘With loads of love from Angie, Jim, Bella, Perry and Squeaks. Don't know if dad told you about our latest addition! He's so cuddly! Do come down and meet him, soon! Ring us! Loads of love …'