No! I Don't Want to Join a Book Club: Diary of a Sixtieth Year (19 page)

I hate to find myself one of the aren’t-all-men-a-load-of-wallies brigade, but sometimes it’s hard to resist the role.

So whenever I’m feeling a bit lonely, I just have to say to myself “SITT!!” or “What’s for lunch, pet?” and the desire for a man completely vanishes.

Very pleased to read, when I gasped my way back from the V and A, that apparently, after the age of fifty, our chances of a serious bike accident increase…they rise 5 percent every decade after fifty. It’s not just because our reactions are slower, but because we have such stiff necks we can’t turn them far enough to see what’s coming up behind.

Think I’ll give up bicycling.

October 31

Saw, this morning in the bath, that my knees are covered in scars anyway from old bicycling accidents I had when I was twelve. Really weird, these visual voices from the past.

Michelle put her head round the door before I went to bed to discuss the latest with Harry, whom I still have yet to meet properly. Like Gavin, he hasn’t rung for days. It is absolutely agonizing to hear all this, particularly having been through it all myself, and knowing that Michelle’s got years and years of it before she’s old enough to settle down. It is her birthday and she is only twenty, poor girl. All that misery ahead.

Since Harry isn’t going to take her out on her birthday I suggested she come to the Thai round the corner with me. Privately I thought it would almost be more fun for her to sit alone in her room watching telly than going out for a meal with her ancient sixty-year-old foreign landlady, and hedged my invitation round with all kinds of get-outs like: “But of course, if you get an invitation to go to a party or a club or out for drinks with your friends, just tell me, I won’t be offended…” but she said she would like to have supper with me.

I rather hope, for her sake, that she gets asked out.

Later

Angela, my other aunt, has just rung, saying she is eighty-three, all her friends are dead, she is so upset about her husband who has just died—he was such a lovely old duck—she doesn’t want to live, why do they do all this research on keeping us alive, she asks?

Later

Michelle’s friends never called, so I took her to the Thai. What constantly surprises me is the selflessness that comes with old age. I don’t mean one’s selfless in some noble or admirable way. More that nothing matters anymore. I used to have a nervous breakdown if I wasn’t facing outward in a restaurant, if the water they brought was still and not sparkling, if there was a draught…Now I feel I’ve drunk enough sparkling water to quench my thirst forever, I’ve faced outward so many times I’m bored with the view. I suppose, also, there’s that feeling that if something really bugged me, I have enough confidence to ask for things to be altered, quite nicely and without causing a scene.

We talked a lot about love, and I tried not to say that if she didn’t find it, it didn’t matter. I do think the direct pursuit of love is one of the most destructive aims in the world.

“I know, darling,” I said. (This use of the word “darling” is getting too frequent. I’m starting to sound like some frightful old actress.) “Like an arrow in a bow all quivering to go, with no target,” I said, demonstrating as I did so and knocking over the soy sauce.

“Exactement!”
she said, laughing. “You know,” she added, “I tell my friend at work I leeve on my own with a woman of sixty!”

“Oh yes!” I said, trying hard to smile lightly and finding all my muscles had seized up.

“But she say: ‘Ees eet not borr
eeng,
leeving with one old woman?’ and I say: ‘No, ees not bor
eeng.
Yes, she is vairy, vairy old, but she is also vairy, vairy cool.’”

I practically fainted I felt so flattered.

Nov 1st

Listened to
Desert Island Discs,
with my least favorite man, Bill Nighy, and he chose a Rolling Stones record called
Winter
and it took me straight back to running along the cobbled streets of Liverpool when I saw the Stones in the sixties, hand in hand with an old lover by whom I had two abortions. (As he said at the time: “To have one abortion, Miss Sharp, may be regarded as a mistake, but to have two looks like carelessness.”) I could smell him, remember the greasy hotel room we stayed in, recall the inky, dark, glowing evening light as we ran…it was like a drug trip—that sudden surge of memory and emotion, an emotion that, oddly, I don’t remember feeling at the actual time.

November 2nd

Penny rang saying she’d been shopping in Fenwicks, had seen a counter selling scent she used to do PR for so went up to look at their literature, and the assistant had gathered up some bits and free samples, put them into a bag and handed them to her, saying: “Something for you to read on the train home, dear.”

“She thought I was from the
country
!” said Penny, horrified. “
Me!
She probably wouldn’t have a job if it wasn’t for my company. The cheek!”

November 3

Rather a nasty surprise as I came running down the stairs to get the post. Have to say those new antiinflammatories really do the business. I spend my entire time turning my head round like an owl to show how supple and pain-free I am. Of course at about forty-five degrees it gets a bit ouchy, but what the hell.

Anyway. The nasty surprise. A letter comes from the Planning Department to the Residents’ Association (me, basically) saying that someone has bought the Kwik-Fit garage down the street and they want to turn it into an evangelical church called Praise the Lord! Inc. My heart absolutely sank. The only reason the Residents’ Association was created originally was because of an evangelical group that set up in a house nearby and spilled out into the garden in the summer. You couldn’t go into the garden at all in the evening without hearing the preacher’s frightful curses of hellfire and damnation for anyone who was homosexual or who had had an abortion, and as for anyone divorced like me (or who had had two abortions), we would roast in the fire for eternity. Not much fun as you’re sitting having a drink and a crisp in the evening sun.

So my immediate reaction to Praise the Lord! Inc. was, “Over my dead body.”

I summoned all the members of the Residents’ Association and got them over tonight. Penny’s very loyal. She comes to these things but never says anything, and always agrees with everything we say. That’s the kind of committee member I like. Of course I, preferably, would like a committee made up of deaf and dumb people, and then I could fire off my letters in all directions without a by-your-leave, but unfortunately democracy rules in Shepherds Bush.

At the end of the meeting it was agreed I should write a letter of objection on account of the noise, and then, thank God, everyone went home, except Penny, who stayed and had supper.

She said that she’d been so miserable after being blown out by Gavin again last time, that she’d gone round to the new young doctor. I think she’s panicking that she’ll be carted off to the Priory, where she’s already spent six weeks of her life in the past.

“When it comes to depression as you get older,” she said, “the good thing is that you can spot it a mile away as it comes galloping over the hill—but the bad thing is that every time you get hurt it’s worse than the last time.”

“Why is that?” I said. “I would have thought it got easier.”

“My theory is that when you’re one year old and miserable, you’re just miserable. When you’re two years old and miserable, you’re not only miserable, but it reminds you of the last time you were miserable so it’s worse. By the time you’re nearly sixty, any upset rings so many bells in your past that it’s like some ghastly bell-ringing competition in your head. Gavin dumping me upsets me, but it also reminds me of my divorce, which reminded me of my father dying, which reminded me of my mother trying to kill herself, which reminded me of the au pair going away…and on and on…”

“Sounds frightful,” I said. “What did the doctor say, anyway?”

Turns out she put Penny on some antidepression and anxiety pill, which we looked up in my big book of pills, called
Medicines for All,
and found that its side effects were fits, headaches and, surprisingly, for an antidepressant, depression.

Nov 4

Woke this morning unable to get the words “Matubile Land” out of my head. Am I going mad? Is there such a place?

Later

Hughie looked in to borrow some linseed oil because James had got it into his head that he wanted to clean and oil all the furniture in their flat. I also wanted Hughie to look at the planning application from Praise the Lord! Inc. to see if he could think up a brilliant legal way of squashing it. I got a bottle of champagne from the fridge.

“It will smell disgusting,” said Hughie, taking the linseed oil as he sat down in the garden. He put his hat on the table.

“Not a cunt’s hat, I hope?” he asked.

“Just a touch too small,” I said.

I always feel just a tiny bit odd around Hughie, it has to be admitted. Even though he’s sixty-five, he’s incredibly attractive and, of course, bright and cynical, which makes him extra sexy. I know he’s gay so there’s no chance of anything, and anyway I don’t want to get involved with anyone, blah, blah, blah, but he did once have a girlfriend and there’s something between us. A chemistry. Or is it just affection? I constantly feel that he knows that I know that he knows…even when James is around, I always have the hunch that Hughie is secretly collaborating with me behind James’s back.

What is it about men that makes them attractive? Their movements, I think. Doesn’t matter whether they’re fat or thin, but they must move elegantly. Their cleanliness—I’ve never gone for an oily rag of a man. And of course, much as it galls me to say it as it’s such a cliché, incredible intelligence and an ability to make fantastically good jokes and laugh uproariously at mine don’t actually count against them.

Hughie’s got one of those faces that always looks permanently interested, and as if he secretly finds life a huge joke—which I think he does. Hughie is also a smoker, which again I find rather dishy. He always has a fag when he comes round because James won’t tolerate him smoking in the flat.

“How’s being sixty treating you?” he asked. “Still enjoying it?”

“Brilliant,” I replied.

“As Bob Hope, I think it was, said: ‘At twenty we worry about what others think of us, at forty we don’t care what they think of us, and at sixty we discover they haven’t been thinking of us at all.’”

I laughed.

“Old age isn’t really very nice, you know,” he said, after a pause. “Being sixty is fine, perhaps, but after sixty-five, it’s downhill. I can feel it. Less sex. Puffing when you go upstairs. Having to mop your mouth all the time in case you’ve got drips…you look so young, my darling, but when I look in the mirror and see those wrinkles…I was such a golden boy, you know.”

“You’re still gorgeous,” I said. And there was a pause after that and Hughie turned and looked at me for one of those fractions of a second that just said something but I don’t know what because he’s gay, remember?

“Any news of the MRI?” I asked, rather clunkily changing the subject.

Hughie paused for a moment, continuing to look me in the eye and laughed.

“‘Gorgeous,’” he repeated. “You’re a naughty girl. When are you going to find a nice bloke? You’ve been single too long.”

“Stop changing the subject,” I said, the teensiest bit flustered. “MRI. Dates, please.”

“Since you insist, it’s in ten days. November 14th. OK? Now back to you and relationships.”

I waved away the question. “All over. Relationships,
nein danke.
I’ve made a big decision and I’m never, ever, ever going to have sex again. The whole thing just isn’t comfortable anymore. Oh, I know you can smear yourself with creams and stuff yourself with hormone replacement pills and the juices will start flowing naturally again, but the last time I had sex I was screaming with pain, not with pleasure. And look what Penny went through with Gavin! She’s still got cystitis, you know. Two months later.”

“Do you really mean that?” asked Hughie. “I thought that today, even the wrinkliest of specimens are, according to most of the media, meant to be ‘up for it’ till the day they die—preferably ‘on the job.’ God, I miss it.”

“Rubbish. We women are always told to ‘listen to our bodies’…and when I listen to mine it goes, ‘Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!’ Anyway, sex brings only trouble and misery, in my experience. I’m glad to be out of it.”

“And never a thought for poor old Archie?” said Hughie slyly. “I saw him the other day and he kept talking about how attractive you are. Come on, Marie. You can’t give up sex. You’re lovely. You’re a sexy person. You’re kidding yourself. If it’s the last thing I do—and, at the rate I’m going, it might be—I’m going to see you settled with a nice chap. You deserve one. A nice chap deserves you, too.”