Cockfosters

by Helen Simpson

  She paused and scowled up at the ceiling.

  ‘I know a woman of sixty-four who had her children in her early twenties,’ she continued. ‘And now she’s having to deal with her ninety-three-year-old father as well as house one of her divorced daughters and provide hefty chunks of childcare for various baby grandchildren.’

  ‘She doesn’t have to,’ said Mae coolly.

  ‘True,’ admitted Liz, momentarily confounded.

  There was a pause.

  ‘Though sometimes it seems boundless, what you give,’ she added.

  ‘It’s not, though,’ said Mae. ‘Boundless. Is it.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘Once in a while I leave them all to it, I always have done. Every now and then I need to cut loose. Travel.’

  ‘How?’ said Liz.

  ‘I call in a few favours,’ shrugged Mae. ‘Set up some basic support. Youth hostels have no age limit. I have my life to think of too.’

  ‘How do you not feel guilty?’ said Liz after a while.

  ‘I do feel guilt but I react to it by just doing more of what I want to do. I take more.’

  The room was quiet again as they both considered this.

  18:44 CAKE

  ‘I still can’t quite get over being able to walk out of the house without setting up an entire support system,’ said Liz. ‘Lists of food, emergency numbers and so on.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ve recently taken on a fantastic amount of work, and I’m really looking forward to it.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I tell you it’s not vanity that’s the issue, is it – it’s employability. Keeping your place in the world. I want to carry on working. I’m doing the best work I’ve done in my life but – and I notice it every time I go for an interview – fifty is a black mark. They think you’re their mum!’

  ‘I’m going to get one of those fish-throats, I can see it coming,’ said Mae, pinching her neck pensively. ‘My mother had one so I don’t see how I can avoid it.’

  ‘What do you say now, Mae, when people ask your age?’

  ‘Sometimes I tell them to mind their own business,’ said Mae. ‘Sometimes I just stare at them. But I really don’t care. I don’t have to; it doesn’t affect my work. What do you say?’

  ‘I say, guess! As in, guess the weight of the cake in the village tombola. In fact, I do think if they ask your age they should insist on your weight as well – it’s just as relevant to your health and fitness for the job.’

  ‘I don’t think that would catch on,’ said Mae. ‘I don’t think that would be very popular.’

  ‘Imagine if they stood there trying to guess your weight aloud as if you were a cake at a village fete!’

  ‘Yes …’

  18:48 BLOOD

  Mae stood holding Liz’s forearm in a pulse-taking clasp, motionless as a statue.

  ‘All this talk,’ said Liz. ‘And we’re not even there yet. At least, I don’t think I am. Are you?’

  ‘No. Not really. Though I find there’s a new unpredictability.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Funny, though,’ said Mae. ‘When blood appears after a long pause – seven weeks recently – I feel pride. Blood makes me feel strong and powerful. I’d hate to have another baby now, but it makes me proud to know I still could.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Yes, it would be strange to leave this behind, thought Liz; even at the times when internally she had been melting and trembling, crumbling, with hot joints, hot swollen breasts, it had been being in another state. But these new tides of thin heat flowing just under her skin, like shadows racing over hills when clouds cross the sun – these were interesting too. Inconvenient sometimes, but interesting.

  ‘And now that the drama of our fertile years is drawing to a close …’ continued Mae.

  ‘Melodrama, more like.’

  ‘Will you mourn it? Will you mourn it as a little death?’

  ‘Petite mort,’ said Liz. ‘That’s what they call orgasm in America, isn’t it.’

  ‘Not in France?’

  ‘I think they say jouir in France, as in, to enjoy. It’s weird to call it a little death, I think, when the actual experience is more like waking up.’

  ‘I thought it meant epilepsy,’ said Mae. ‘Petite mort.’

  ‘That’s le petit mal.’

  She had even come to look forward to it over the years, each time it came round, the volatile week. Yes, it could be a nuisance in practical terms but sometimes she felt cleverer, she felt as though she saw and understood more … Nor was it false, the thin-skinned emotion that emerged at such times. Extravagant more like, so that life appeared as lurid and backlit as an El Greco. Not untrue; not to be acted on, either.

  ‘As for mourning it,’ she said now, considering Mae’s query. ‘I suppose it’s time passing, another step towards the grave if you see things in those terms; but I don’t. No. Not unless it means I’ll somehow feel less intensely; not if it means emotion will become less powerful.’

  ‘I don’t really see why that should happen,’ said Mae.

  ‘What I wouldn’t want is to get very cut-and-dried; you know, very blunt and dismissive and set in what I felt about everything.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But then again, sometimes I think I really wouldn’t mind feeling less,’ said Liz perversely, with feeling.

  They fell quiet, separately musing.

  ‘I envisage the new state as being like Arizona,’ said Mae at last, opening a new packet of needles.

  ‘Arizona?’ said Liz, nonplussed.

  ‘Yes,’ shrugged Mae.

  ‘What, a desert?’

  ‘No, not that. I see it as … It might be …’

  ‘Phoenix. Tucson. Why Arizona?’

  ‘I see it as arriving in another state,’ said Mae, slowly. ‘Brilliantly lit and level and filled with dependable sunshine.’

  ‘Oh!’

  ‘In fact, I can’t quite believe in it,’ said Mae. ‘This promise of …’ She stopped again and fell silent.

  ‘So that’s it,’ said Liz. ‘We’re about to emigrate.’

  It’s true, isn’t it, she thought. Already I’m not as quickly moved to tears as I was ten years ago; soon I’ll have cried all my tears and only laughter will be left.

  18:55 RISORGIMENTO

  Mae walked round the table, peering closely at Liz’s face and hair as she extracted the long needles one by one.

  ‘Do they ever break off?’ asked Liz, raising one hand gingerly to feel.

  ‘Never,’ said Mae firmly.

  ‘So I won’t find the point of one in my scalp tonight when I come to wash my hair?’

  ‘No! It doesn’t happen. The needles are very fine but they’re very strong as well. Now, careful as you sit up. Slowly.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Liz as she swung her legs off the edge of the table. ‘Oh! I feel really clear-headed. Alive.’

  ‘Good. Now, would you like to see how it goes or book a follow-up appointment?’

  I want to go ahead unashamed, thought Liz as she reached for her bag. Is that possible? Unashamed. Brave! At the very least brave, because you’ve got to be. At every stage really, looking back, and this is no different. Except now there’s no need to fit in because for the first time there’s no particular template.

  ‘I don’t want just to accept it – I mean to enjoy it,’ she declared to Mae. ‘I like being here, now, this minute.’

  ‘Well we’re all living in time,’ said Mae, glancing at her watch. ‘That’s fifty pounds, please.’

  ‘Cash, isn’t it,’ said Liz. ‘I went to the machine on the way.’

  ‘Thanks. Women our age – it’s different now, it’s not the image that’s put out, is it. Look at us! We’re strong and active, we’ve raised children and earned money all our lives; we’re fine. Look at you with your big lecture next week on … what was it?’

  ‘The Risorgimento,’ said Liz.

  ‘Yes. And while you’re getting dresse
d, it’s supposed to be a good thing as you get older if you can put on your socks or tights without sitting down or leaning against anything.’

  ‘What, like this?’ laughed Liz, standing on one leg like a flamingo, unsteady, one arm flailing for purchase in the air, teetering, hopping from side to side, finding her balance.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mae, laughing too. ‘Like that.’

  Berlin

  DIENSTAG/TUESDAY

  ‘Remind me why we’re here again,’ says Adam as he watches their companions decant themselves slowly and more or less painfully from the minibus.

  ‘You know why,’ says Tracey.

  ‘We must be twenty years younger than any of this lot. Thirty in Trevor’s case. And Olive’s.’

  ‘Fifteen,’ says Tracey, smiling at the others as they come towards them. ‘Thirteen? Less. Pauline can’t be more than, er, sixty-eight. Anyway, don’t be such an age snob.’

  ‘Trust my parents!’

  ‘It’s been a hard year. You needed a break and this was booked and paid for.’

  She notices she still has his best interests at heart so she probably won’t be able to leave him. But they really can’t go on like this. Can they?

  Their seats reserved for this Ring package are at the back of a raked box of six ranked in pairs. In the middle row are Pauline and the venerable Olive – two sensible white-haired widows Tracey supposes them to be – and in front of them the bearded ones, Howard and Clive.

  ‘I hate opera,’ says Adam.

  ‘You said you’d keep an open mind,’ says Tracey.

  They had originally agreed to accompany Adam’s mother here over a year ago. The Ring cycle, his late father’s favourite, would be the best way to mark what would have been their diamond wedding anniversary, his mother had decided: suitably epic and time-consuming. Not long after booking it though she had herself died, and they had had to watch another coffin glide towards the flames. Meanwhile Culture Vultures, true to their name, would refund only one ticket of the three.

  Much of the time Adam’s father had shut himself in his den and kept the household cowed by blasting out Wagner at full volume. He had resented the very existence of his children, according to Adam and his brothers; he would simply rather they had not been born and had made this quite clear during the years they had lived under his roof. Then, when at last in middle age his sons had felt brave enough to ask him why, he had beaten a hasty retreat down the corridor of dementia; as Adam had said to Tracey at his funeral, four years ago, ‘It’s like he had some South American bunker waiting in the jungle.’

  ‘I hate opera,’ he now says. ‘And I really hate Wagner.’

  ‘Look, we’d both booked the time off work,’ says Tracey. ‘And we haven’t exactly got money to throw around.’

  ‘I know, I know,’ he says.

  She hopes this won’t set him off on his current favourite hobby horse, how as an architect he has made so much less money than his brothers in insurance and advertising even though he’d been cleverer than them at school. Luckily he has been deflected from this path.

  ‘Just look around at this lot,’ says Adam. ‘They’re all so delighted with themselves for being here. They make me sick.’

  ‘Let’s make the best of it,’ says Tracey. ‘Think of it as a challenge, like Everest.’

  ‘What, a feat of endurance?’

  ‘Why not. You like a challenge. And a change is as good as a rest.’

  ‘Huh!’

  ‘Also, Wagner is supposed to have unearthed the deep stories of Germany and I for one want to find out what all the fuss is about. We’re European, aren’t we?’

  ‘Are we?’

  ‘Well, I am.’

  ‘OK, OK,’ says Adam, flapping the programme in front of his face. ‘We’re here now. Stuffy, isn’t it.’

  Tracey looks out across the auditorium and registers the predominance of snow-topped heads. Even you’ve gone grey, she thinks, glancing at Adam’s angry profile.

  ‘No interval,’ he says, finding the English language section in the programme for Das Rheingold. ‘They’re having a laugh! Two and a half hours straight through?’

  ‘Um, the Culture Vulture notes say this is the short one,’ says Tracey, finding them in her handbag and scrabbling for her reading glasses. ‘This is like a prelude to the other three. Do you want to know what they say about it?’ She does not wait for an answer. ‘In a nutshell … Greed for gold, greed for property and power means breaking contracts, losing love, going against nature. Quasi-Marxist analysis of society; elements of a creation myth; da da da, remarkably prescient on climate change.’

  ‘Oh, great. Climate change as well. Wonderful. That’s the icing on the cake!’

  ‘Look, the lights are going down. It’s about to start.’

  ‘Can’t wait.’

  ‘Let’s get lost in the story,’ she whispers, taking his hand. ‘The surtitles will carry us through.’

  Silence. Then, from nothing, from almost nothing, from one long low chord, there grows a gradual swell of sound, a rising tide of it, and the stage is slowly flooded with rippling blue-green light. This is beautiful. It’s like the beginning of everything all over again. Tracey relinquishes his hand and touches the side of his face. His mouth twitches in a reluctant smile.

  Ah. Oh dear. Three stout singers in shiny bodysuits have arrived and they’re singing very high and loud against the noisy orchestra. That’s wiped the smile off his face. What do the surtitles say? ‘Wagalaweia! Wallala, weala weia!’ What sort of language is that? And now, ‘Lass’ seh’n, wie du wachst!’

  Oh my God, the surtitles are in German: she realises this at about the same time as Adam, who turns towards her with an expression of silent outrage.

  Well, there is nothing she can do about it now, is there.

  Gradually she jettisons the ballast of the day and her thoughts start swimming out into the flood of this non-stop music. After a while she realises this is not like other operas she knows. It’s not like The Marriage of Figaro or Rigoletto; here the orchestra is on the go the whole time. There aren’t the usual distinct arias and duets.

  ‘It’s all so unnatural, opera,’ Adam had complained earlier.

  ‘Once you get that what they’re singing is their inner thoughts rather than normal speech then it’s a breeze,’ she had told him.

  The big luxury is making yourself understood and in ordinary life that’s asking too much. It can’t be done. Nor are they going to understand much of what’s going on here without surtitles.

  It is having a strange effect on her thoughts, sitting here drenched in sound, so that they unfurl in unaccustomed slow motion, not fleeting at all. Random memories present themselves for inspection as though they have been waiting for this space in which to unpack themselves. On the radio last week she had heard a scientist talk of new brain imaging systems that would mean all your emotions and reactions to life could be logged and placed alongside others at your death: a library of souls. Ha, she thinks, there’s bound to be an app for that soon. They say, why let the past drive the future? The past is over. Yes. But I think it’s like a piece of music, particularly this sort of wraparound music. You’re in it, inhabiting it. What you remember, though, and what you want, they change too, don’t they? She glances at Adam’s set and angry profile. This ill-suppressed bad temper, she thinks, the inadequately fire-blanketed rage; they’re no fun to live with.

  On stage now there is a new scene, a middle-aged couple lying side by side asleep. For some reason they bring to Tracey’s mind the couple who had been in front of them at the airport check-in desk that morning, a retired builder and his wife. A good two decades further down the line than her and Adam, they were off to Miami (they had confided) for a Caribbean cruise; last year they’d had to go from New York because of the weather and had spent two nights on a concrete floor, snowed in until after a mad late dash they’d caught the cruise with only five minutes to spare: what a nightmare!

  So why would you
volunteer for the same again, Tracey had wondered; two nights on a concrete floor in your seventies doesn’t sound much fun. Then, as the woman had continued with details of the final close-call cab ride to the ship, her face animated, proud even, she, Tracey, had understood that it was their first adventure of the year as each year rolled round and that its value lay in sharing the adventure with each other.

  Adam might mock but the fact that everybody else on this trip is of pensionable age will serve to make them both feel younger by comparison, surely? He’s right though, at least two of the group are well into their eighties: Olive, in front of them now, and Trevor, with his somewhat younger wife Denise, somewhere in the stalls. Yes, a Ring package is obviously ideal if you’ve had a hip replacement.

  The couple onstage have risen from their bed and they’re quarrelling already. Now he’s leaning on his spear and glowering while she goes on at him. The habit of resentment, the habitual tone of injury (thinks Tracey), they’ve caught that well. All long-lasting loves have their betrayals. Obviously. We’re human beings. And who’s to say blocking or blanking them is any worse than blame-laying and excoriation?

  Their parents’ generation had been dead set against what they called ‘wallowing’. They had practised denial on a massive scale, refusing to talk of painful memories, believing that if you blanked the past for long enough it would disappear. Denial! It was supposed to be a harmful thing and yet it seemed to have worked well enough for that generation, which was after all the most long-lived so far in the history of the world.

  The men on stilts have grabbed the golden girl, she’s struggling but it’s no use. Off they go, dragging her along with them. The stage darkens. The ones left behind have started to stagger and hobble around, they’re not looking good. Who knows what’s going on? Tracey hasn’t got a clue. Adam looks at his watch.

  Everyone is getting so old but at the same time they’re careering around all over the place instead of hunching down by the fireside; and the thing about travel is that it does make your time seem longer. She thinks: I’m always amazed at how long and alive the days are when I’m away, even when they’re unenjoyable or tiring. Today has lasted almost a week so far by that count.