No! I Don't Want to Join a Book Club: Diary of a Sixtieth Year (14 page)

Much as I feared and loathed this man, I couldn’t help being touched by a spark of compassion.

“I’m so sorry,” I said, suffused with a mixture of pity and at the same time a vicious feeling that he had got just retribution for his frightful behavior.

“Yeah. Well,” he said. “I’m going to fight it. That’s all I can do. Fight it.” He turned away, and as he walked across the road he looked diminished, more like a padded skeleton than an old bully boy.

From then on I have seen him every day, sitting at the wheel of his parked mighty maroon four-wheel-drive car, smoking his cigarettes, “fighting it.”

Don’t think Hughie will do much “fighting it” if the worst comes to the worst. He
did
go to the doctor’s and was put on a course of antibiotics, but James tells me his cough is just as bad as ever, so he’s going to go back to see what else is on offer.

September 2nd

Went round to see Jack and Chrissie, who is finally out of hospital. I thought these days they barely dragged the placenta from the womb before they chucked new mothers on to the streets, but, perhaps because she’d had a Caesarean, Chrissie seemed to be in for days. This afternoon she went up to have a sleep just after I arrived, and Gene lay quietly on my lap.

Jack is clearly overwhelmed and overjoyed. They are talking of having a “head-wetting” in a pub rather than a christening, which is fine by me. Jack asked me about what songs I thought ought to be sung and I just sat, stroking Gene’s head. No, I didn’t feel any love for him, I thought, but there was no question: He was awfully sweet. The panic I had felt when he had just been born seemed to have disappeared. And what struck me, as I touched him, was how my own hands looked so fat, puffy and middle-aged, like my mother’s hands. And Gene’s hands are, like all baby’s hands, so utterly tiny and moving. It is what everyone says when they first see a newborn baby, after all. “Oh, look at his tiny fingers! His tiny fingernails!”

Jack made me a cup of tea, and Chrissie came down, exhausted, but still radiant and incredibly happy. I held Gene and patted his warm little back after he’d been fed, supporting his floppy head. He made little sucking movements with his mouth. He looks quite baffled to be here. I went up with Chrissie to change his nappy. Everything quite different to how it was in my day, of course—these days, throw-away nappies, with kind of Velcro fastenings; none of those terry-towels with nappy pins. No buckets full of Napisan. And all kinds of different creams and unguents to put on his tiny bottom.

“Why don’t you have a go?” said Chrissie.

What was so peculiar was finding how familiar it all was. How my right hand went instantly to his ankles, to lift him up, how I wiped his bottom with the back of the nappy, then gave him a good clean and blew him dry, and covered him with cream and powder and then lifted up his oddly thin bottom again and slipped the nappy into place—it was like riding a bicycle after one hadn’t ridden one for years. Then I picked him up and held him close, his head and weak little neck resting on my shoulder. His baby smell, a mixture of sharpened pencils and talcum powder, gusted over me like fairy dust. Later, when I looked at my watch, it was half past six, but I didn’t really want to leave.

I drove home feeling very peculiar. And then I realized. I was so heavy and sodden with adoration for Gene that I could hardly change gear. I seemed to have acquired a great burden of love that hadn’t been with me when I had left the house. I finally made it back to Shepherds Bush, staggered in through the door and sat for a few moments, regaining my strength. I rang up Jack’s dad. It was the most extraordinary experience. When you are sixty, you don’t expect suddenly to discover that someone new has come on the scene for whom you feel overwhelming love. And instant love, as well. Not the slow-growing affection you feel for friends.

“He is absolutely lovely,” I said, on the verge of tears. “I can’t wait for you to see him!”

“And have they decided on a name?” asked David, nervously.

“Gene,” I said. “And do you know,” I added, meaning every word of it, “it’s a
wonderful
name! It suits him down to the ground. He looks like a Gene, he breathes like a Gene, he just
is
a Gene…”

David burst out laughing.

September 3

Rang Penny to ask if she’d like to come with me to see Gene sometime. Oddly, she didn’t seem terribly keen, though she’s agreed to pop in one day when Jack brings him over. Simply cannot understand why anyone would
not
want to see Gene, since he is so incredibly interesting and charming. Hughie says that all babies look the same. I say that all babies look the same—
except for Gene,
who, oddly, is the only baby I’ve come across who is so exceptionally lovely looking with such intelligent eyes, such a kindly face…

Managed, after hours of chatting about Gene, to remember to ask Penny how she was, and she said she’d just come back from the Family Records Office.

“Why on earth did you go there?” I asked.

“I wanted to find out how old the philosophy professor really was,” she said. “He certainly isn’t the age he says he is, that’s for sure. I was going to go back today to look him up in other years in the directories, but you won’t believe this: I suddenly couldn’t remember his last name!”

“A senior moment?” I suggested.

“A CRAFT moment,” she said.

“What’s a CRAFT moment?” I asked.

“Can’t Remember a Fucking Thing,” said Penny.

September 4th

Having taken Pouncer to the vet last week and discovered he has an overactive thyroid and kidney problems, I have spent the last few days trying to shove pills down his throat. It is extremely difficult to do this on your own, as it involves completely disabling him with one hand and, with the other, opening his mouth and throwing a pill into the far regions, and then shutting his mouth and stroking his throat till he gulps. I’ve already got two nasty bites like that and last year, when I was involved in the same pill-chucking procedure, got a wound that went septic, and then
I
had to go on antibiotics.

No one to stuff them down
my
throat, though, luckily.

I’ve tried sneaking the pills into pieces of fillet steak, but he has an amazing way, even when I bury the pills deep inside, of managing to remove them before eating the meat.

However, today I have discovered some cunning camouflage chaps, called Tab Pockets, soft little squidgy cat treats with slits in them in which you conceal the pill.

Today Pouncer ate one.

Poor fool!

September 8

All these dreams. I am being driven crazy by them. Last night I dreamed that I was in some kind of work camp. I had two babies and I was given a syringe with which to inject them with some lethal poison. When I’d finished, I said to a passing woman who was wearing a green, flowered, ragged dress: “I am so unhappy. Please put your arms around me and squeeze me like an orange.” After she had done this she gave me a chain that her husband had given her, which turned into a piece of green soap, shaped like a baby’s hand, which melted in the bath.

Where do they come from, these dreams? I once went to the most frightful counselor when I was feeling I couldn’t cope, as we all do at some point in our lives, and she always wanted to know my dreams, which she would interpret in weird ways. Once I dreamed I was trying to work out the VAT on a new fridge and she assured me that really I was dreaming about vats of wine. Pretty peculiar leap, if you ask me. I think, as counselors so often say in their soft, knowing voices, that it said more about her than it did about me. Ha!

Unfortunately far too late to reveal this interpretation to her, which would have reduced her, I like to think, to complete pulp.

I wonder if all this anxiety I’m suddenly feeling isn’t a kind of postnatal depression? Can grannies get postgrannie depression? PGD? I certainly don’t feel “myself.” Though what on earth “myself” actually is, I have no idea. Suddenly starting to worry terribly about dummies, which I think are an essential part of a baby’s emotional health. Have a horrible idea that Jack and Chrissie may consider them naff.

September 9th

In order to get all these horrid thoughts out of my mind and to throw a bit of reality on the situation, I went to see Gene. Not as simple as it seems, of course, since I have to disguise my visits so I don’t appear too desperate to pop in.

“I was thinking of going to Tate Modern this afternoon,” I said, when I rang Jack. “And as it’s only halfway to you, I wondered if I might drop by?”

Two days ago I’d rung saying: “I’ve got to go to Chelsea…just wondered if you were in, as it’s only a few minutes away.”

Yesterday: “I had ten people to dinner last night, and have a lot of stew left over. Would you like it for supper? I’m going to be your way…”

Jack and Chrissie must think I spend all my time in South London. It’s tragic. Particularly tragic as, in order to make my excuses vaguely valid (excellent as I am at lying to other people, I just can’t lie to Jack) I do indeed have to “do something in Chelsea,” or whatever, on my way. So far this has involved going round the most ludicrously expensive wallpaper shops and even dropping in to Peter Jones, purely in order to give my journeys some kind of authenticity. And I suppose, today, I will be obliged to see something at Tate Modern—groan.

Later

Not that easy when you’re in a car because you have to park miles away, practically in Greenwich, and walk. By the time I got to the Turbine Hall, I was so bad-tempered I stumped around the Rachel Whiteread installation in a very cross mood. Then I found that I couldn’t get to the second floor of the shop through the bottom floor of the shop—only out of the door and up some other stairs—and my mood worsened. Then the exit that would have taken me out to look at the river was roped off with ribbons and arrows. And the loo was on yet another floor.

Finally staggered up to the fourth floor to see the Henri Rousseau. At the door, the girl said: “Tickets for sale on the lower ground floor.”

So I simply stumped out and back to the car. Stump. Stump. Stump. Who wants to see Henri Rousseau anyway? Just a lot of old tigers in jungles. Probably seen them all in France years ago. One of those painters who’s just as good reproduced in books. Grr! As one of his tigers might have said. Though actually quite relieved to have an excuse to get down to see Gene rather earlier.

“You needn’t pretend, Mum,” said Jack kindly, when I arrived and he rumbled my pathetic strategies. “Come over anytime you want.”

“But if I did I’d be here all the time!” I said. “I’d be living with you! I’d never go away!”

At that moment Gene suddenly woke up, screaming. Jack held him and jigged him about but nothing helped. Finally I took him and stuck my finger in his mouth. He latched on to it and nearly sucked the nail off.

“He can’t be hungry, he’s just been fed,” said Jack wearily.

“What this little chap needs is a dummy,” I said.

“A dummy!” said Jack. “But they look revolting! Chrissie would never allow a dummy in the house!”

“Now you’ve got a baby you can’t start worrying about aesthetics, for God’s sake,” I said. “I had to put up with going out with you wearing nothing but a dreadful Bri-Nylon Spider-Man suit for six months when you were small, darling. Dummies are essential. Babies suck on them for comfort.”

Oh dear. I just can’t stop looking at Gene. I can’t stop thinking about Gene. I’m like a lovelorn teenager pining for Cary Grant. Well, not Cary Grant. Who used I to pine for? Ashamed to say it was Richard Burton, a man whose very pockmarked face now gives me the creeps.

Get back to find a message from Penny saying she has some amazing news to tell me.

September 10

It was a completely different Penny who rang on my bell that evening. She was all aflutter, giggly and, I have to say it, rather irritating. I spent about twenty minutes telling her all about Gene and how brilliant he was, until I finally remembered to offer her a drink and allowed her to get a word in edgeways.

“I’ve got a boyfriend!” she burbled. “And he’s only thirty! And he knows my real age! And he doesn’t mind!”

Horrible as it is to admit, I felt rather put out. I always felt she was a loyal friend, and to find she’s now got some bloke is extremely irritating, happy as I am for her to have found someone. I mean, she is going to be sixty next month, and thirty is on the young side. It can’t last. And I found myself telling her so rather too quickly. We sat down in the garden (on the nice new stripey chairs I got from Tesco last week) catching the last of the September sun. Pouncer was sitting staring out of a bush, watching the woodpigeons on the lawn.

“I
know
it can’t last,” she said, rather irritably. She picked at a piece of salami I’d got from the slimy delicatessen. “I’m not a complete fool. But I actually met him last weekend, and he said he fancied me and I just can’t believe it.”

“And what about the philosophy professor from Northumberland?”

“Oh, dreadful man. Turned out he was seventy-seven. Hair growing out of his nose,” she said dismissively. “But Gavin, he’s totally wonderful!”

“Married?” I asked. “Unspeakably unattractive? Looking after four severely disabled children? Mentally ill?” I ticked off all the likely pitfalls.

“No…isn’t it extraordinary?” she gushed.

“Look, if he fancies a woman of nearly sixty, there’s got to be something wrong with him,” I reasoned.

“I know, I know,” she said, half sobbing with delight. “But I don’t care. He’s just so-so-o sweet! He says I’m his soul mate. And we have
everything
in common. He’s got exactly the same ideas about interior decorating as I have, and has got the most wonderful taste. And guess what he was reading—
Death in Venice
…the most wonderful book in the world, as you know, and he used to stay in exactly the same house where I used to stay in Norfolk when he was small, he even knows the PR agency I used to run, and says it is brilliant. He just
loves
Eartha Kitt, who, of course, is magnificent, and Lena Horne, and has seen
The Wizard of Oz
ten times. I’ve just never met anyone I’ve had so many connections with. I feel as if I’ve met my long-lost brother.
And
he fancies me!”