No! I Don't Want to Join a Book Club: Diary of a Sixtieth Year (3 page)

Of course it’s fine chucking white wine down yourself when you’re young, but apparently, if you do it long enough, it erodes, as I read in some terrifying health piece in the
Daily Mail,
all the tiny little wiggly bits, or fibulae (?) on the way down, and the mucus can no longer collect and settle and moisten the whole thing, and it becomes a kind of arid passage, ripe, apparently, for cancer germs or spores or whatever they are, to flourish.

I told her I’d made an appointment with a surgeon tomorrow to see about my feet. My feet are a nightmare—dry and cracked (gnarled might be a better word, actually. What is it about the “g” in “gnarled” that makes it such a cruel word?). I keep thinking I ought to get some Scholl’s cream to rub into them. “Has it come to that?” said Penny. “Come to that”: an expression I’ll be hearing a lot more in future, I suspect.

But the real problem is the huge, agonizing bunion on one foot, inherited from my mother. Fixing the bunion will cure the pain, according to my podiatrist, one of a profession that hadn’t been invented when I was born, a man who has already sucked me dry of nearly all my savings by insisting that I need special orthotics, or supports.

He’s tried all sorts of things already, of course. He gave me a catalogue of special shoes, none of which I could ever dream of wearing. Most of them were “stone-colored” and there were lots of trainers modeled by glamorous young girls who never in a million years would wear that kind of footwear. In real life, they’re worn more often by women who seem to spend much of their time in service stations, women with huge, fat swollen ankles and purple knees covered by very clean beige trousers, sporting mysterious kinds of blokish haircuts.

Penny is worried about HRT. She spends a lot of her time trying to get the balance right between estrogen and progesterone, and is convinced that too much of one or the other gives her panic attacks. Luckily I gave it up three months ago, and it’s made not the slightest bit of difference. If anything, I think I look and feel rather better. I can now spot women on HRT—they all have a Teresa Gorman look about them, with huge boobs and unnaturally plumped-up skin.

Not sure I like the idea of hormones at all, really. I always remember when I once taught in an all-girls’ school and became so freaked out on hearing that women working in close proximity menstruated at the same time that I held my breath every time I went up or down in the lift, in case my cycle started to think about getting synchronized. I couldn’t bear the idea of us all bleeding away at the same time every month.

What a blessing to be rid of all that! It wasn’t the blood I minded; it was a very minor bore. No, it was the endless noting its date down in my diary, I remember, and then, a week before a period was due, writing: “Might feel weird…” to remind myself that any mood I got myself into should be regarded with suspicion. It is very unnerving to realize that one’s actual personality can be dominated by hormonal fluctuations. But no longer, ho ho! When I was young we used to call it the “curse,” but that extremely accurate and descriptive word has been erased by political correctness, along with other essential pieces of vocabulary: “cripples,” “loonies,” “nutters” and “old bats,” many of which apply to me.

“By the way, do you floss your teeth?” I asked Penny before she left.

“Not a lot, no, why?” she said.

“All my teeth seem to have great gaps between them, suddenly,” I said. “My mouth looks like castellation on a medieval turret.”

“It’s because your gums have receded,” said Penny. “They do when you get older, you know.”

“Oh, God. The trouble is that when I floss my teeth, not only can I feel all my fillings wiggling about, but my gums start to bleed. You don’t know a good dentist, do you?”

“Well,” said Penny, rummaging around in her bag for a phone number. “It just so happens, that I do. This is one I went to last week…”

Out of her bag fluttered a couple of photographs. I picked one up. It was of a man in full leathers standing by an enormous motor-bike. “Friend of yours?” I asked jokily as I handed it back.

“Oh, er, no,” said Penny, clearly embarrassed as she stuffed it back into her bag. “No one. Lovely evening. Must dash.”

Later

Thinking things over, I wondered about that photograph. Penny’s illegitimate son? But she hasn’t got one, as far as I know. Her only child is Lisa, a wayward daughter of thirty-five who lives on benefits, much to her mother’s despair, and whose biological clock is ticking so loudly you can hear it from Herefordshire, where she lives.

Then the penny dropped. It could only be one thing. A man from Dating Direct. Penny had told me she was thinking of logging on, but I never thought she’d actually get round to it. I rushed upstairs to my computer and scurried around the site, and very soon, to my amazement, found her. There was a picture of her that must have been taken before I ever knew her—it looked as if she were about fifteen—and beside it were written the words: “Fun-loving, intelligent, good figure, likes reading, walking and singing. Vegetarian though will eat fish. Looking for like-minded nonsmoker. Age: forty-eight.”

Forty-eight! My jaw dropped. She’s only a tiny bit younger than me! But mustn’t say anything, as it would be too humiliating for her.

I’ve never gone online for a man, but I have, on occasion, trawled through the small ads. The men sometimes sound OK in the written ads, and then it all turns to dust when you ring their box number and listen to their frightful voices.

“Hello!” they say, reading off a script, which they have, it’s clear, been practicing at home. “I’m sixty-five years young and have a good sense of humor and still, I hope, a sense of adventure.” This is usually said with an artificial chuckle. “I hope I’m presentable—my female friends say that for a bloke with a bald head and a bit of a paunch, I’m very attractive! But that’ll be up to you to decide! I like going to the theater, walking, wining and dining. I love music and I go to the gym two or three times a week. I have two dogs—so if you don’t like animals you’re not the woman for me! I care deeply about the environment and my ideal day would be a morning walk, followed by a drink and a good meal in a country pub, followed by, perhaps, a good film or a discussion about a book we’ve both read. I know you’re out there! Why don’t you ‘go for it’ and contact me? Whatever you feel, I wish you all the luck in the world in finding that special person…”

Of course while I listen, I’m sitting back in my little house puking and sneering over every word. Goes to the gym three times a week? Has he nothing better to do? As for discussing books, forget it. As far as I’m concerned there are only two phrases to describe books. One is: “Absolutely brilliant! You must read it!” or “Total crap. Don’t touch it with a bargepole.” And what exactly, might I ask, does the verb “to wine” mean? I know about “whining”; indeed, I’m an expert, but “wining”? “I wine, you wine, he wines, we wine, you wine, they wine?” Surely not. Does it mean to get pissed? Or does it mean ordering a glass of warm Chardonnay or Pinot Grigio at the Goat and Duck from a bottle that was opened last July?

Oh dear, I’m such an old meanie. The awful thing is that these blokes often
do
sound rather sweet, in spite of their ghastly habits. But GSOH! OHAT (Good Sense of Humour. Own Hair and Teeth)! Preserve me!

In fact I’m often amazed by my women friends who manage to make really good sexual relationships with men. For me, they (relationships) have always been fantastically complicated affairs, like trying to set the video recorder to record in advance, and invariably end in tears. I think men must join the long list of things that I am never going to manage to master, like the stock market, the history of China, the structure of the European Union and tap dancing. I am seriously thinking of giving them (men, that is) up for good.

These thoughts were checked by my cat, Pouncer, winding his tail around my legs, so I carefully picked off all the remaining red mullet from the bones and gave it to him. He sniffed at it and then looked at me in an angry, hurt way, as if he’d been offered a dish of arsenic. Aren’t cats funny? Red mullet does cost £8 a pound, after all. Woops, I mean kilothings. There are some things I have decided I will never get the hang of, and kilothings is one of them.

Nov 9th

This morning I knocked on Michelle’s door to see if she was OK.

“I am good,” she said, staring straight ahead of her. She was lying in bed in an orange bedjacket made, it seemed, entirely from feathers, and a pair of knickers, watching breakfast telly. I asked if she’d been looking for flats. “No, not a beet,” she said. “I like it here. You are like my muzair.”

Her “muzair,” as far as I remember her when I last met her on the Champs-Elysees, is a gorgeous and seductively slim blonde who looks about nineteen, wears top to toe leather, and has a card that reads “Marie Fontaine: Lady of Leisure. Expertise: Shopping and Bopping!” in French, I don’t quite know what to make of it all.

(I, on the other hand, am, natch, full of quiet dignity, groan with Protestant work ethic and rarely spend any money at all. I was born to scrimp and save, keep pieces of string, iron old wrapping paper for use a second time around and believe it or not, even keep my tights going by cutting off one half when one leg ladders, and wearing it with another single leg to get the most wear out of them. “You don’t!” said Penny, incredulously, when I told her. “I do!” I said. I may be a wild child of the sixties still with a penchant for gorgeous clothes from Whistles and agnès b., but I’m also a frugal war baby—an odd combination. We both are.)

Hope Michelle will be able to cope with the house on her own while I’m away this weekend staying with my old friend Lucy.

November 10th

Got up at six and spent the whole morning putting yellow Post-Its everywhere as reminders for Michelle. “Have you double-locked?” is stuck to the front door. “Remember to feed Pouncer!!” is on the door to her room. A series of arrows along the floor leads to my sitting room, ending up by the window, with the instruction: “Shut the shutters at night!” on the final one. The cooker features a warning: “Turn all gas off before going out or going to bed!” On the floor by Pouncer’s food is one with an arrow pointing to a bowl. “Pouncer’s water! Keep filled up!”

And on the kitchen table is a huge list of the phone numbers of Hughie and James (ex-half-brother-in-law), Penny, my mobile, my number in the country, the vet’s number, the emergency vet’s number…plus various other bits of information about where the burglar alarm is situated, who to ring if it goes off, where the fuse-box is…The house looks as if it’s all set up for a treasure hunt.

Finally got off at midday, utterly exhausted with ironing clothes, putting things in my suitcase then taking them out again, worrying about whether one bottle of champagne was a good enough house present or whether I should take two or whether that would look flash.

I drove off, and on the way down decided to look in on my father’s grave. It’s in a lovely village churchyard.

Whenever I tell people that I’ve been to see his grave, they usually get very serious and mournful and say how “brave” I am, or how moving it must be, or some clichéd bit of nonsense. But when I visit, I don’t just think of him, and how I miss him. I also think how incredibly grateful I am to him for popping off reasonably early. He was seventy when he died, but unbelievably, I know a man of seventy-five who’s
still
visiting his ancient, confused mother. It must be such a burden. Staggering up to some old people’s home, riddled with arthritis yourself, to visit a living corpse who doesn’t even recognize you. What a life. Or, rather, what a living death.

Both my parents are dead, luckily missing the “live forever” generation from which I also hope to escape with a mixture of bravery and cunning. And sad as it is that they’ve gone, it’s good, too. After all, I don’t think you ever really become yourself while your parents are alive. Until they go, you’re still, at some level, someone’s child.

When my father died, I felt sad, but I also felt like some plant that had been struggling to survive under a giant rhododendron bush, a bush that was so abundant and magnificent, that flowered so richly every year, that spread its beautiful great green glossy leaves so broadly, that there was hardly any place for me to breathe.

So when I went to see him in his grave, it was really to say thanks for dying. It’s when I know how he’d laugh if he heard me that I really miss him.

Lucy lives in a cottage deep in the country. She’s a wistful-looking person, tender, funny and deeply compassionate: She runs a charity for asylum seekers, and spends her entire life, as far as I can see, visiting wretched Rumanians—or Romanians, as they appear to be called these days—who live in frightful compounds all over Britain, and helping them fill in forms to get them out. Or fund-raising. Or campaigning for their rights.

Anyway, during the weekend Lucy told me she had been made a Member of the British Empire, and when I asked how she was planning to celebrate when she came to Buckingham Palace to receive the award, I was horrified when she told me that she was simply going to “come down to London, get the award, have a pizza at Pizza Express and go home.”

I couldn’t believe my ears. “But we must have a party!” I said. I’m terrible about parties. I love going to them and giving them. Any excuse. “I’ll give one for you!”