Fifty Is Not a Four-Letter Word (9 page)

Anita sighs loudly. Rupert wrinkles his nose as though a bad smell has wafted by. I look at Olly. He looks pleased at Jack’s
response. I want to say to Olly, “Be careful.” I don’t. Instead, I casually ask, “Who are you going with?”

“There’s a bunch of about twenty from my year. We’re all meeting up in Camden first.”

That’s a relief. I didn’t think Vanessa would be up for it. She doesn’t have the right shoes for marching.

“Anyone for more crumble?” I ask.

About five hands shoot up; they’re like a bunch of enthusiastic school kids. If I’m catering for ten, I make enough for twenty.
It’s a simple enough calculation.

“Sarah? William? Sam? What about you?”

“March or crumble?” says William.

“Both.”

“March not possible,” says William. “We’re invited to lunch with friends in St. Albans. In any case, the jury’s still out,
as far as I’m concerned. I’m undecided, and I’m certainly not ready to engage in an all-out protest. But I’m definitely up
for more crumble.”

“Pass your plate. Maddy, you need fattening up.”

She looks so pale and thin and sad, though she’s trying desperately not to let her emotions show.

“Mum,” says Olly, “I’m meeting Ravi. Mind if I go in a minute?”

Before I can answer, my mother launches in. “There’s something I need to tell you all,” she announces, pushing aside the remnants
of pudding and lighting a cigarette. My mother is the only person Jack officially allows to smoke inside the house. The deal
is that she brings her own ashtray. “I could take each of you off into a corner and tell you one at a time, and try to break
it to you gently, but what would be the point? What’s got to be said has got to be said.” And then she coughs. The coughing
goes on for a full minute.

Oh no, not again,
I think, waiting for the cough to subside. Not some new bandwagon that she’s about to jump on. Last time I saw her, she was
rabbiting on about the Kabbalah, having read an article in the
Daily Mail
. And tonight she’s sporting one of those mangy little red thread bracelets that the Kabbalah people wear to ward off the
evil eye or some such mumbo-jumbo. Or perhaps she’s decided to take Daddy off to an ashram in India.

My father, sitting next to her—as he always does—squeezes her hand supportively.

She has stopped coughing. “I’m dying,” she says without a trace of tremor in her voice. “Six months at most. Nothing interesting
or original, just cancer. First Maddy’s poor sister, now me. This cancer business has gotten quite out of hand. It’s my own
fault, of course.”

I find I can’t chew the crumble in my mouth. At first it was delicious; now it sits there, gloopy and sticky, like newly mixed
cement. I can’t swallow it, but neither can I spit it out.

Instead of shock or sorrow, what goes through my head is this:
Trust my mother to make a spectacle of herself. To put herself center stage, as usual. To turn the whole thing into a performance,
as if she’s Meryl Streep in a Hollywood weepie
.

My own mother has announced she’s dying, and this is how I react. It’s disgusting, I know. I look at my father, who’s opposite
me. His eyes are watery with age but with tears, too. I want to race around the table and take him in my arms to comfort him.
To tell him that it will be all right. That I’ll take care of him. I look at my mother and feel oddly empty. Who is this dying
woman I hardly know?

At the back of my mind, I always had this idea that one day my mother and I would sit down and talk and talk and talk and
I’d ask all the questions that I so desperately craved answers to. Like, why haven’t you ever loved me? Why haven’t you ever
supported me? Why haven’t you ever taken an interest in Olly? Why have you always been the center of your own universe? Why,
if Daddy was the only person who ever mattered to you, did you have children? And the answers would make some kind of sense.
And the difficulties between us would be resolved, and the distance bridged, and closure—as the therapists say—would be reached.
But now none of that is going to happen. The mother I never had will simply die. And that’s something else I will have to
come to terms with in the year of turning fifty.

Maddy, being the doctor in the house, asks sensible questions. The rest of us are incapable of saying anything coherent. We
learn that scans have revealed a large tumor on my mother’s lung. She has smoked thirty cigarettes a day since she was a teenager.
When Sarah and I were young, we didn’t know that smoking was bad for you. We just used to laugh along with my father when
she drew one of her chic du Maurier cigarettes from their distinctive red packet. We’d join in his chanting: “It’s not the
cough that carries you off, it’s the coffin they carry you off in.”

Despite what you read about smoking ravaging your skin, my mother looks ten years younger than her age. Recently, however,
she has had a persistent cough. The tumor, which is called a non-small-cell cancer, is already very advanced. The cancer has
also spread into the chest wall and the esophagus. Palliative radiotherapy is about the most the medics can offer.

“I took your mother to the doctor as soon as we got back from South Africa,” says my father, “but she didn’t want to worry
any of you until she knew for sure.”

This is a side of my mother I’ve not seen. The side that wants to shield us from unnecessary concern, to avoid burdening us
with her problems. My mother has never held back from complaining before. But maybe it’s always been small things she’s made
a big fuss about. Inconsequential stuff, like the impossibility of getting a decent cleaner or the appalling seat pitch in
economy on long-haul flights.

Sarah walks round the table to our mother. “I want to hold you,” she says simply. And she does. She always knows the right
thing to do. When she lets go, Sam does the same; looking awkward and upset, Olly follows suit. I stay where I am. My mother
draws deeply on her cigarette. “That’s enough of that. Let’s change the subject.”

I start gathering up the pudding plates. Olly says his goodbyes and leaves. Anita and Rupert file reports from their absent
children. For once, Anita rushes around being helpful, offering to make teas and coffees.

Soon they all start to leave. I find it so hard to touch my mother spontaneously, so I get her coat down from the peg and
help her into it from behind; it’s the nearest to physical contact I can manage. She starts to button herself up. “Let me
do that for you,” I say. But my hands are shaking, and I fumble with the buttons, prolonging the process. My mother pulls
away impatiently. “I’m not dead yet, Hope,” she says, then reaches out and cups her hand around my cheek and chin.

“Oh, Mummy,” I say as the tears begin to pour down my cheeks, “please don’t die.”

“Don’t be such a baby, Hope, my love,” she says. “You’re fifty, for heaven’s sake. How many women are lucky enough to reach
the age of fifty and still have two living parents? And think of the upside: Now you’ll have Daddy all to yourself. Come on,
Abe, I’m exhausted.”

Get Maddy back on track

Talk to Daddy about the future

Try and square things with Mummy before she dies

Make it up with Olly

Have sex with Jack—or at least dinner and a movie

I
wrote this list at three o’clock this morning. I’m trying to wean myself off the pills, but no Zopiclone means no sleep.
Since January, without the help of a little something to induce a reasonable approximation of a coma, I barely doze off before
jerking awake with my heart knocking wildly against my chest, clamoring to escape. Jack assures me it is anxiety rather than
an incipient heart attack. But I don’t find this especially reassuring. Anxiety feeds itself. And serious or not, the palpitations
are frightening. They can strike half a dozen times before I eventually pass out properly around three a.m., sometimes even
later. Which is why last night I decided to cut my losses and get up, make myself a mug of Ovaltine, and do something constructive.
Hence the list.

I’m definitely in denial about work, and I need an outlet for my pent-up energy. For the first few weeks after getting fired,
I would compulsively check my answering machine and my e-mails after being out, even if I’d only popped out to the postbox
for two minutes. Now I don’t bother with either. The offers haven’t exactly been flooding in since January, or even trickling
in. I glance cursorily at the
Guardian
media pages on a Monday—there are lots of magazine jobs going in the United Arab Emirates. I’m thinking more Soho Square
or maybe Mayfair. It’s not urgent, at least as far as money’s concerned. A big fat check has gone into my bank account, and
my firing has been fiddled to look like redundancy, so I’m entitled to a substantial tax-free sum on the payout. As long as
I don’t start buying bling or playing poker on the Internet for large stakes, I’m financially fine for the time being. Work
can wait. There are more important things to think about right now.

At three a.m. the list looked like the perfect antidote to anxiety—something that would give me back a sense of purpose and
prove what a good friend/daughter/mother/lover I can really be. When I read it again at nine in the morning, the list looks
preposterous, the wish list of a woman with seriously deranged hormones—or maybe Pollyanna. I’m no longer confident of completing
one of these tasks successfully. Even dinner and a movie are looking like a bit of a long shot from where I’m sitting. None
of which stops me getting straight on the phone.

“Maddy, how about supper at Mario’s, just you and me, Wednesday, eight o’clock?”

Maddy hesitates. “Hope, I’m not sure. It’s late-night surgery on Wednesday, and I’m exhausted. And as you know, I’m pretty
useless company at the moment.”

“That makes two of us. I’ll book.”

“Daddy, it’s me. Hope. How about a round of golf? I’ll be your caddy, just like I was when I was eleven.”

“That would be wonderful, but I can’t manage more than nine holes anymore. In any case, I don’t want to be away from Mummy
for too long. Not with her so poorly.”

• • •

I have this problem with my father. I think he’s invincible. I don’t want to hear him saying “I can’t manage more than nine
holes anymore.” It means he’s getting old, something I steadfastly refuse to acknowledge even though he’s eighty-one. When
I think of my dad on the golf course, I think of Jack Nicklaus. When I imagine him playing a game of bridge, I visualize Omar
Sharif. In the days when he mixed a mean martini, I used to think Sean Connery as James Bond. In other words, my father is
my hero. He hasn’t really even done anything to warrant his hero status other than be kind and clever and not at all like
my mother. You don’t want your heroes to have faults, so you don’t look for them, and consequently, you don’t find them. My
dad’s free of flaws, and that’s that.

“Mummy,” I ask, “shall we send Daddy to the golf club for a game of bridge?”

“Good idea. He needs some time off from me, but he’s so reluctant to leave me on my own. You and Sarah might have to take
it in turns to babysit.” Her voice is hoarse, with a rasping edge. “Will you get me some Elizabeth Arden eight-hour cream
and a Dior lipstick in Cointreau? I’m running out.”

Running out of time,
I think, but extraordinary though it is, she’s not running out of steam. My mother’s vanity has not forsaken her, which I
suppose is a signal of her inner strength. I’ve been wandering round looking like a bag lady since the beginning of January.

“I’ll bring them. No problem. How are you feeling?”

She coughs.

Nearly all set. What can I offer Olly? An apology? Money? I’d better tread carefully with Olly, I don’t want to make things
worse than they already are. Perhaps best to say and do nothing, just wait as long as it takes for his general disdain and
disappointment in me to pass. I’m afraid I may have to wait longer than I can cope with. Patience may be a virtue, but it’s
not one of mine.

That evening I greet Jack with a copy of
Time Out
. “We haven’t been to a movie in months.”

“You haven’t wanted to.”

“But now I do.”

“Okay. Great. Look up that new French film, the thriller, the one that opens next week. I think it’s on in Russell Square.
Do you fancy that?”

No, I do not fancy that. I bite my lip. I do like French movies, but I generally prefer Hollywood or Working Title romantic
comedies with Hugh Grant. And I like thrillers, but not when they’re claiming to be intellectual as well, which this one is
almost bound to do.

“Sure, I’ll call the cinema. Shall we go to the seven o’clock performance, and then afterwards maybe we can go for Japanese?”

“Japanese or that new steak place?”

This is marriage for you. If I’d fancied the new steak place, I would have suggested it, not the Japanese. But it is supposed
to be his treat, not mine, and I’m building bridges.

“Steak sounds good. I think the place is called Rib-Eye. I’ll look it up and book.”

This has to be better than moping. The planning has gone to plan. But it’s a long way from successful execution.

• • •

I arrive early at Mario’s for dinner with Maddy because I fancy a little pre-dinner flirtation with Mario and because, frankly,
I don’t have much else to do. I even make an effort with my appearance for the first time in two months. My hair is washed
and blow-dried, I’m wearing hipster Earl jeans with a wide leather belt, a vest top under a tight-fitting bright pink V-neck
cashmere sweater, and pointy kitten-heeled boots. Fashionable but not flash. Suitable for a woman of fifty? Now that I’m nine
pounds heavier, I have my doubts. The extra weight causes my vest and my sweater to part with the top of my jeans. It is not
deliberate. But it probably is disgusting.

“Hope, you make my night.” Mario is upon me before I’m even properly through the door. He doesn’t seem at all disgusted. He
kisses me enthusiastically on each cheek and then squeezes me in a bear hug.