No! I Don't Want to Join a Book Club: Diary of a Sixtieth Year (12 page)

Penny screwed up her face in horror. “Peter!” she said. “He was the most horrible little man who’d brought a whole kit of ghastly sex toys down to London and wanted us to check into a hotel to try them out! I told him I wasn’t remotely interested. He was such a creep. He said he was fifty-six but he must have been at least seventy.”

“Is this wise?” I asked her. “Aren’t you heading for trouble?”

“I suppose so,” she said. “But I never meet any men these days. And I’d like to. Do you think it’s awful? I mean, just because one’s old, doesn’t mean one has to give up sex, does it?”

“Rather you than me,” I said. “But do tell.”

Her next hot date is with a retired philosophy professor—an Aquarian, apparently, whatever that means—who lives in Northumberland and sounds immensely civilized. For a moment I felt envious and wondered: Am I right in thinking that there are no sensible men around? Hughie’s a sensible man. And, I have to say, so is Archie. Then I gave myself a slap on the wrist. I’ve heard the argument before. “Maybe there’s just one…” But there isn’t.

On our list of sights to see was the church decorated by Jean Cocteau at Villefranche, just down the coast. But what made it particularly uncanny was that I remember clearly being ten years old and literally being
dragged
round it by my mother, finding it all unutterably boring.

Who is the real person, I wonder—the ten-year-old being dragged or the sixty-year-old going round full of admiration and appreciation? How many other characters can I expect to be before I die?

One of the funny things about being old is that when you’re four years old, you can only imagine yourself as a one-, two-or three-year-old. But when you’re sixty, you’ve got a vast range of years to choose from. So one day I feel like a miserable three-year-old, the next like a girlish twenty-five-year-old, hop straight into feeling like a mature sixty-year-old and back, before you know it, to being a precocious twelve-year-old. The cast of selves increases and increases until eventually you’ve got a veritable Wagner opera of people on stage to pick from.

June 13

What a great place France is. The countryside is just like England used to be fifty years ago, all wildflowers and bees and butterflies; you’re knee-deep in shrews and otters. And there are all these lovely individual shops. In England we’re just a mass of Body Shops, Starbucks and Tesco Metros, while in France there seem to be no chains at all, except, of course, Monoprix, where charming clothes of all descriptions can be purchased for virtually nothing.

Oh, dear. Suddenly realize I’m sounding exactly like Philippa’s ghastly sister.

Bought Chrissie a very nice black and white pregnancy top, which I thought was extremely smart.

Pottered around Nice and, as always in foreign cities, I find, we ended up going down those strange back streets, full of electrical repair shops, and places selling kitchen equipment, and tires, but finally got into the main drag, where Penny rather unnerved me by declaring that whenever she passed a hat shop, she always wondered which one she’d choose for when she had to have chemotherapy. She doesn’t even have cancer, for heaven’s sake!

Sent Hughie and James a postcard reading: “Yesterday we went to a tiny restaurant in the old town and had scrummy lamb shanks in gravy, salad, pears cooked in red wine and a bottle of wine. The bill was seven pounds each. Yum! Yum!”

Sent a card to Archie (about whom I’ve been feeling rather guilty since I completely forgot to thank him for the delicious lunch) saying:

I mean, it would be nice to see him again. Oddly found myself wondering rather like a teenager whether to put “Much love” or “Lots of love.” “Lots of love” is something to write to everyone now, even the milkman, and it’s got rather debased. “Much love” sounds more considered and meaningful.

June 14

When I got back, I took the top round to Chrissie, full of exhortations not to wear it if it wasn’t right, and I was amazed that not only did she look wonderful in it, but that, despite very polite murmurings, she clearly didn’t like it at all. It slowly dawned on me that all pregnant women these days like to have their bump showing, bursting out of a tight T-shirt. What makes it all even more weird is that they like to show their tummy button sticking out, like a third nipple.

I was rather blown away by the fact that Chrissie didn’t like it. I am usually spot on when it comes to fashion. But I really felt I had egg on my face when it came to pregnancy fashions. I suddenly realized what it must feel like to be an out-of-date old duck who buys some frightful twinset for a daughter-in-law and finds that yes, she does want to take it back to the shop to exchange it. Very humiliating. And yet I know—which is what is so odd—that were I Chrissie’s age, and pregnant, I, too, would want to wear tight T-shirts with my tummy button sticking out.

Rather unnervingly, she asked me about birth.

We sat at the kitchen table, over a cup of coffee, and I honestly didn’t know what to say.

“It’s not brilliant,” I said, in the end, hesitantly. “But it’s not the end of the world, either. And you do forget it very quickly.” Forget it quickly my arse, I felt like saying. Well, I doubt if I would have actually said “arse.” I try not to be the sort of person who says “fuck,” “shit” and “arse” too much because I think it’s a bit undignified for a woman of sixty, like wearing a miniskirt with varicose-veiny legs. But that doesn’t stop me thinking “arse.”

“Tell us what happened when I was born,” said Jack.

I cast my mind back. It was an absolute nightmare. Some junior doctor stitched me up wrongly, I was in agony all through the night, had to have an emergency operation under anesthetic the next day and was in excruciating pain for two weeks. Not only that, but my breasts were so engorged that the West Indian nurses came round and flicked them. “Like concrete, darlin’,” they said. Occasionally, when Jack cried, great squirts of milk came shooting out of my nipples like some dreadful ejaculation. It was really horrible.

“Oh, it wasn’t that bad,” I said lightly. “Well, the birth itself was fine, let’s put it like that.” And the very last bit was. I always remember watching my stomach deflate, like a landed parachute, once Jack had popped out the other end. “And these days, you’re drugged up to the eyebrows.”

I refused to be drawn. Birth is so strange you just can’t predict how people will feel about it. “Why don’t we go shopping and get some stuff for the nursery next week?” I suggested, to change the subject.

Chrissie’s already painted the room they’ve prepared for the baby, and lined a little Moses basket. The walls are covered with frescos of ducks, elephants and cats. Lying across the basket is a beautiful lacy white shawl with yellow daisies embroidered into each corner, knitted by Chrissie’s grannie. And suddenly I feel completely inadequate.

Will it all come back to me, like riding a bicycle? Will there be new ways of child-rearing that I won’t understand? Will I be of any use to Chrissie at all, or will I be an old lady, all fear and fingers and thumbs and forgetting that above all, you
must support the baby’s head at all times
? Will I be stuffing bottles of boiling milk into his little mouth? Will I get the mixtures all wrong? Will he choke on a grape that I’ve given him? Will I forget to read the crucial label:
May contain nuts?
Worst of all,
what if I don’t I love him?
And yet I’m the one who’s meant to be experienced and calm. And I’m not!

Help! Help! Help! HELP!

June 15th

Supper with Lucy, whose London base is at the top of a mansion block in Belsize Park. She said, on hearing my voice through the intercom: “You might find it easier to take the lift.” I notice, when I get up to her flat that she does not say this to any other guests.

Latest e-mail:

Golly, men are weird. They always were and they still are.

June 16th

Went to a movie with Penny. It was so truly dreadful that we walked out halfway through. The truth is that having seen so many films in my life, I now know exactly what is going to happen in most of them. I know how they’re going to be shot, I know everything. When I was young, movies were still experimental—and every time you went to the cinema you experienced some new thought, some wizardly fresh idea. Now, apart from the odd foreign film, about one every couple of years, they all seem the same.

“I knew who the murderer was, didn’t you?” I said to Penny.

“Yes,” she said. “It was the hero. Or ‘protagonist,’ as heroes are now called.”

We checked on the mobile with James, who’d seen it, to see if we were right.

“Hughie walked out after ten minutes,” he said. “He knew who did it, like you. But I think it’s got something to do with Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of Morphic Resonance.”

“What’s that?”

“Oh, you must know. As far as I know, the general drift of the theory is that the reason you find a crossword puzzle easier to do the day after than on the day it’s published is because so many other people have done it on the day it came out and their knowledge is pooled in the great subconscious, which we all tap into.”

“So the more people who’ve seen a movie, the less surprising is the ending?”

“Precisely.”

“It’s Morphic Resonance,” I told Penny, when I’d said goodbye.

“Oh, God,” she said. “Is it catching? What’s the cure?”

Turns out that she has her date with the prof from Northumberland on Thursday. I fear for her.

And yet I have to admit, I envy her. Just a speck. Despite all evidence to the contrary, I still can’t help having a fantasy in the back of my mind that somewhere, just somewhere, there might be a bloke who isn’t a complete screwball.

But, of course, there isn’t.

July 1

I have been keeping the old white-painted wooden high chair of Jack’s for…well, it must be thirty years. And I’ve been keeping it, let’s be honest, for a grandchild. Now, at last, I can off-load it, so I barged into Michelle’s room and tried to reclaim it. Unfortunately she has used it as a spare dressing table and the little tray, the seat and the flat piece of wood at the bottom are all completely covered with things that she calls “products.” What she wants “products” for I have no idea, since her skin is in full bloom, the skin of a nineteen-year-old, but there they all were, facial scrubs, lotions, antiaging cream for her neck (I could do with some of that—she certainly doesn’t need it). Everything seemed to be made from chamomile, avocado, aloe vera…an evil-looking plant with treacherous spikes, illustrated on every label. I tipped them all on to her bed, and staggered downstairs with the high chair.

I bet they don’t like it. I bet they want a plastic, wipe-clean affair, which turns into a baby trampoline at the touch of a button and doubles up as a sling. But this is far, far nicer. It was secondhand when I bought it, and made in the forties…it converts into a kind of weird seat with wheels, featuring a few faded colored beads on a rod of metal.

Rather surprised to find that it didn’t look as if Michelle’s bed had been slept in last night.

Later

No Michelle and no post either. The post has been completely terrible recently. I met a postman in the road who couldn’t speak English and was trying to find the police station. He was standing right in front of it.

Maybe Archie didn’t even get my postcard, which would account for silence from him. But who cares about Archie? I don’t. No, I don’t. No, I really don’t.

July 2nd

No sign of Michelle today, either. I have rung her mobile but it’s just an answering machine. And anyway, when I went back into her room to look for clues, I found her mobile was actually on her bedside table, charging up. And her handbag seemed to be there as well. I suddenly had a dreadful vision of her just popping out to the shops to buy some more “products” for her face, and being lured into a van by a bunch of Romanians who were, at this very moment, gang-raping her in a dank concrete cellar.

Later

Still no sign of Michelle. I am out of my mind with worry. I rang Penny and she said not to worry, it would surely be OK…these things always are. But she didn’t sound totally convinced when I said that Michelle was completely naïve and hardly spoke any English. I know it seems mad, but I’m going to ring round the hospitals.

Later

No sign of a stray French girl at any of the hospitals. I finally rang her “muzair” in France, but that was an answering machine too, and before I knew it I’d burbled out an anxious message, with no way of retracting it.