No! I Don't Want to Join a Book Club: Diary of a Sixtieth Year (15 page)

“Well, good for you,” I said, but my heart wasn’t in it. I was sort of jealous—and sort of annoyed because I knew it would all end in tears, and I would be on the receiving end of countless miserable phone calls, and partly terribly sorry for her. Thirty years’ age difference just doesn’t work.

Apparently Penny met this guy on some weird writing course where he fell for her hook, line and sinker. He runs a crystal healing shop in Glastonbury and she’s going to spend the night with him next Friday.

“But what will you do about sex?” I asked.

“I don’t know!” she said rather desperately. “I’ve gone to the doctor to go back on HRT and she’s given me some Orthogynol cream to shove into myself, which apparently makes the vagina more lubricated, but I’m sure it’s going to be agony.”

“I’m sure it will be,” I said, remembering the last time I’d had sex. After the menopause your vagina gets all dry and miserable and having sex is like having oneself rubbed down with sandpaper on the inside. “I’d use K-Y Jelly as well, if I were you. I think I may have some upstairs.”

And I went up to my grandmother’s old chest of drawers and rummaged around among the death pills. Sure enough, there was some ancient K-Y, long past its sell-by date, but it looked to me as lugubrious as ever was. If that’s the right word. Lubricious? Lubricative?

“Why on earth have you got this?” asked Penny, when I brought it downstairs.

“Never you mind,” I said. “But you bung that up yourself and I’m sure you’ll be fine.”

“His mother’s only forty-eight!” moaned Penny. “Oh, it’s so awful, and so wonderful. And it’s doomed, all doomed. And I’m going to be so miserable. Oh, Marie, why did I get into this fix? I wish I were strong-minded like you.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “Have a good time. I’ll ‘be there for you’ when it’s over.”

“Oh, Marie, it’s ‘come to that’!” moaned Penny, “You’ll ‘be there for me.’ This doesn’t look promising, not promising at all. It’s just that he’s such, such a darling…”

I didn’t like the sound of this “darling” one bit, but tried to appear light-heartedly enthusiastic about the whole business. The trouble with Penny is that, although she’s quite sensible and feet on the ground most of the time, when it comes to men she can suddenly tumble down a black hole and then it’s chaos and the seventh circle of hell. And who is the one who’s sending baskets down on ropes to try to haul her up? None other than yours truly, sensible old Marie.

“The funny thing is that when one’s young one thinks, ‘Oh it can’t last because the man
doesn’t
want marriage and children,’ and when one’s old, one thinks, ‘Oh, it can’t last because the man probably
does
want marriage and children,’ and one can’t give them to him!” said Penny. “And honestly, Marie, you’re right. It has no future. There’s no way we’ll be together for longer than three months at the most.”

“Archie’s got a young Swedish girl of thirty-five,” I said. “Only minutes after Philippa died.” I was surprised to find that as I said it, I felt a pang of something.

“But you know it’s completely different for men,” said Penny rather crossly.

“Barbara Windsor married a man twenty-six years her junior,” I said, trying to be consoling. “Joan Collins and what’s-his-face, thirty years younger?”

“Marie, don’t bullshit. You know and I know that this is going to end in tears,” said Penny with a flash of her old self. “And the other awful thing is that because I, like you, am a sixties’ girl, I go straight back into that servile ‘yes-you’re-a-man-I’ll-do-anything-you-want’ mode when these days all that’s changed.”

“Maybe that’s what he loves about you,” I said.

“Marie, I’m depending on you, during this whole disastrous caper, to help be my sensible self,” said Penny. “I rely on you to pour cold water on everything. Don’t start encouraging me in my madness. Please. Though thank you,” she added, changing like Eve (as in
The Three Faces of,
the movie), getting suddenly all girlish and fluttery, “for the K-Y. Oh, I can’t stop thinking about him! It’s awful!”

There was a pause while she stared at her empty glass. I suddenly caught on and rushed to the fridge to get the bottle to top her up. When I got back I was astonished to see tears had come to her eyes.

“You should feel happy, not miserable,” I said, putting my arm round her.

“But I know already that the relationship hasn’t got a hope,” she said, rather sadly. “You see, you’ve got Gene to love. But I don’t have anyone.”

And I suddenly realized how selfish I’d been, always talking to Penny about Gene. It must have been much more painful and envy-making for her than it was for me hearing her talking about this bloke.

But Gavin! Glastonbury! Practically half her age! How could she?

Later

Pouncer has discovered the Tab Pocket trick, and now refuses to eat them. Back to the throat-stuffing.

Later

Went to the shops and coming back was amazed to be met by a woman in a burqa speeding toward me on one of those disabled motorized chair things. She had slowed down just before my house and as I passed she waved angrily at a man who’d obviously insulted her in the street. “Fucking Irishman!” she shrieked in a strong cockney accent, from inside her black shroud. “I’m more fucking English than you are!”

Later

Penny rang with a query: “What does K-Y actually stand for?” she asked.

Sep 12

Rather worried because yesterday Michelle hurried up to her room with a man in tow—and not just any man: a man twice her age (but probably half mine). I only glimpsed him on the stairs, but I saw that he was missing one tooth, had a ring through one ear, was half-shaven and his jacket smelled strongly of dope. Having been around so many addicts in the sixties, I have one of those noses that can sniff dope out at twenty paces. In fact, if I were paid enough, I’d be happy to shuffle round Heathrow on my hands and knees checking suitcases for drugs.

When, later, I asked her what he did, she looked very dreamy and told me, simply, that Harry, for that is his name, was “a genius.”

“What do you mean, a genius?” I asked, immediately suspicious. He hadn’t looked like a genius to me.

“He ees poet,” she said. “He ees writer, film director, designer of gardens, photographer, he write plays, he ees performance artist, he create installations…”

The poor girl thought that the more professions she laid on this wretch, the more impressed I would be, but quite the reverse. Being old and experienced, with every new talent this man went down in my estimation rather than up.

“Darling,” I said. “I think he’s a bullshit artist.”

“Bullsheet?” said Michelle. “He ees certainly artist,” she added, her face suffused with admiration.

“Well, next time he comes round, introduce him to me,” I said rather sharply. She said she would. One look at my knowing old bat face, I knew, would keep this creep away for good. I’ve fallen for my fair share of “geniuses” in my time. Been to bed with them. Lent them money. Believed them when they said it had fallen down a drain and could they have some more. The genius can’t fool me.

Sep 13th

Just read today that grannies are more likely to get heart attacks than people who aren’t grannies. Can’t understand it. Total tosh. Far from courting a heart attack, being a grannie, for me at least, makes me feel there is even more reason to go on living than before. And these days the irrational worries I used to have about Jack have practically disappeared—because I know that now he has to take charge of someone else, he, too, will become even more responsible than he was before.

There is also the bizarrely pleasurable knowledge that my family is now part of a chain. On one level I couldn’t give a fuck—oh, Marie, no no no! That is not a nice word for an old person to use! All my contemporaries say it, but it just doesn’t suit them—anyway, I couldn’t give a pin, let’s say, or a fig, whether the Sharp genes staggered on to the generation after next, but now I’ve discovered that they have, I feel ever so slightly smug. So smug, in fact, that I find it terribly hard to talk about Gene to anyone who either has no children or who has children but has not yet got grandchildren. I should never have told Penny how happy I am about him. It’s exceptionally bad manners to gloat.

September 14th

Michelle asks, “What means vegetation?” She swears that this is a plantlike substance that, in France, grows up people’s throats and into their sinuses, and has to be cut back regularly in some patients. I simply cannot believe it. She then asks me if I know how to pronounce the film
Beneer.

After five tries, I look baffled.

“Beneer!”
she says. “Charlton ’eston! Many horses!”

September 15th

Couldn’t resist it. I went to John Lewis today and bought a knitting pattern.

It was my grandmother who’d originally got me started. She bought me a book called
How to Knit
published by Paton and Baldwins. The patterns were not only for socks and vests, but strange garments like mittens, pinches (?), footlets and spencers. She also bought me a pair of huge wooden needles. She taught me how to wind the wool round my fingers so it wouldn’t slip and, snuggled in the corner of her vast sofa, I would struggle to control these vast sticks that, in my small hands, seemed like two great broom handles, waving around beyond my control.

After hours of trying, I succeeded, eventually, in knitting my father a twelve-foot-long lime-green scarf in secret for Christmas, which he nobly wore for years. Occasionally it trailed out beneath his duffle coat and dragged along the ground.

I had a very odd moment in John Lewis. I was looking at the carpet for some reason, which was bottle green, and something seemed to spring out of it like that creepy thing in
Alien,
and whack straight into my heart. I think it reminded me of a bottle-green coat I once had, but it filled me with a mad and poignant mixture of comfort and nostalgia. The John Lewis staff around me must have wondered whether to put their Health and Safety strategies into operation when they saw me staring at the carpet, completely goofed out.

And then last week I saw a leaf on a bush and for some inexplicable reason it reminded me of walking to school on a hot autumn day, holding my father’s hand. The tears that sprang to my eyes were inexplicably pleasurable.

Everyone tells me how they are losing their memory now that they are getting older, and complain about “senior moments,” but I, on the other hand, am astonished by how much my memory has improved. The short-term’s got better because I am so much less anxious than I used to be. And I also take masses of fish oils. If fish could improve Jeeves’s brain, then they can improve mine, too. But what is wonderful is the sudden gift of long-term memory. Cracks seem to appear in the walls of my consciousness, revealing glimpses of the past as clear as if they were happening in front of my eyes. Sometimes I feel intense emotions about these moments that I never, as far as I remember, felt at the time.

September 20

This afternoon I just sat in my garden with a cup of tea doing absolutely nothing. I say, nothing. A lie. I was eating a delicious gingernut—oddly, the presence of Gene has got me back to biscuits. Chrissie keeps a tin of biscuits and offers me one with coffee whenever I go over, and today I took the big step and bought some for myself.

Pouncer was lying on his back on the grass in the golden September sun, his eyes closed in bliss, his velvety paws resting in the air. So vulnerable. On the cherry tree sat two woodpigeons as fat as gray cushions, and hopping on the lawn was a blackbird looking for worms among the daises. Toward the back of my garden, where there is a forest of trees and shrubs, it was green darkness, from which, amazingly, emerged a gray squirrel.

I had one of those really weird moments when you feel like St. Francis. Not only do you feel like St. Francis, but you also feel peculiarly at one with nature. I never used to feel like this: it feels like another age thing. Nature is saying: “Now you’re getting on and coming to the end of your life, come and join us. We’re your friends. There’s nothing to fear.” It was definitely a presentiment of death, but not a creepy ghoullike-figure-in-a-black-cape-clutching-a-scythe kind of presentiment but, rather, a beautifully peaceful and seductive kind of presentiment, a call to a world where the phrase “Go for it!” and other such unpleasant prods to do an Open University course or live for three months with a Masai tribe in Africa, have no place at all.

Sep 25

These things can never be repeated, of course. Today, I made my cup of tea and got out the last of the gingernuts, and sat down in the garden with my Sudoku puzzle—a fatal addiction that was introduced to me by Lucy, who is a demon at it. They say it keeps the brain active, but it just drives mine into a frenzy of fury, mental cross-eyedness and frustration until the final stage when it all works out, and you’re flooded by this ludicrous sense of achievement, swiftly followed by a terrible sense of inner emptiness. Anyway, I’d just got going and done all the threes and the fives, when over the gardens the raucous noise of a football match commentary blared out through the trees.