Long time no see. I was in NYC last week and I bumped into Candy Stratton at a women’s networking thing. She said you were looking for a job? She gave me your email. Funnily enough, I had lunch with someone today who said her friend was going on maternity leave from Edwin Morgan Forster of all places! New name, new building, new staff, but same old, same old basically. It’s marketing, business development, bit of admin. Too junior for you but might be a way in? I think Maggie said the person you need to contact in HR is a Claire Ashley. Worth a try?
Good luck, Miranda x
*There are 153 calories in a flat white made with semi-skimmed milk (214 in full-fat variety). You need to walk forty minutes to burn 153 calories. Roy gives me this information about ten hours after I drank the coffee. He needs to speed up.
6
OF MICE AND MENOPAUSE
Today is my seventh session at the gym this week. Even God got to rest on the seventh day, but God was only trying to create the world, not restore a middle-aged female body to a state of battle readiness. I’d like to see how long that would take Him.
What can I tell you? Everything hurts. I have pain in parts where I didn’t know I had parts. But this is a good thing. Finding the old me, the leaner, keener, meaner me, within this sad and sagging sack is the object of the exercise, and, boy, am I exercising. When Conor, my trainer, said we would be doing Tabitha, I thought, ‘Oh, that sounds nice. Maybe some cat-like stretches (tabby cat, I suppose)?’ Turned out it was Tabata, some new Japanese fitness torture where you do a series of exercises eight times for twenty seconds with ten seconds’ rest in between.
The worst is the lunges, where you have to bend one knee and stretch the other leg out behind you in a kind of masochist’s curtsey. Conor’s instruction to ‘lay on the floor’ sounds relaxing, but I now realise that that is code for stomach work, even more hellish than the lunges, if such a thing were possible.
‘Pill your billy bitten to your spain, Kite.’ (It’s a New Zealand accent, you need to hear it.)
I’m trying, I’m trying. My belly button has not connected with my spine for many years. In fact, the pregnant Lycra bulge I see when I survey the length of my stomach from the supine position strongly suggests that the two named body parts may no longer be in the same postal district.
Conor is great, though. A Kiwi of few words, he is excellent at ignoring my panted excuses and yelps of anguish. Every morning, he says a combination of three things: ‘Awesome’, ‘You are in the zone’ and ‘Set your own goals and I’ll help you get there.’ My goal is to be able to climb successfully out of the driver’s seat of my car when every single muscle is screaming, ‘You must be fucking kidding me!’ On the plus side, it can’t be long before I qualify for a blue disability parking badge.
All of the above is in preparation for my interview on Thursday. Claire Ashley, head of Human Resources at EM Royal, as Edwin Morgan Forster is now called, said they were ‘very interested’ in considering me for the position and thanks so much for my email. (How many times have I read and reread Claire’s three-line email, examining it for any nuances I may have missed?) Alternately, I tell myself not to get too excited (it’s not a great job) then I get excited (it’s a job!). A rather lowly marketing position trying to bring in new business, that’s pretty much what Miranda said in her email, and at my old investment management firm of all places, but an opening, nonetheless.
Somewhere, a heavy, glass door sighs in its airlock and a woman approaching fifty sprints to get her fingers in the gap before it closes.
7.48 am: Back from the gym. Absolute agony and, thanks to lunges, now walking with thighs splayed apart like John Wayne in a gunfight. Even squatting down to sit on the loo is excruciating; will soon have to pee standing up. Take a shower, as hot as I can bear, to soothe angry muscles. Decide that I haven’t left enough time to go to the hairdresser to get my colour done and fit in a leg wax before the interview. So will have to shave legs myself, for the first time in yonks, risking the wrath of beauty therapist Michelle, who believes that self-shaving is the work of the devil and promotes rampant hair growth. I locate my long-lost Ladyshave under the sink and scream. Has a pirate been in my bathroom? The head is clogged with a clump of dense black hairs. A whole beard’s worth. Trust me, there are few sights more disturbing than unknown hairs in your shaver.
Richard appears at bathroom door in a new towelling bath robe and asks what I’m making such a fuss about. I say that my shaver has been abused by werewolves.
Rich laughs lightly before explaining that the culprit is none other than himself.
‘You used my shaver. How about using your shaver?’
‘Not for my face, darling,’ Rich says, pointing downwards. Dear God. My husband’s legs look like chicken drumsticks – deathly, almost bluish, pale skin with dark dots where the hairs used to be.
‘You shaved your legs?’ For a second, I wonder if this heralds the start of Rich transitioning to a woman. Honestly, at this moment nothing would surprise me.
‘Marginal gains,’ says my husband.
Apparently, some study has shown that the aerodynamic improvement offered by hairless legs could save five seconds in a 40 k bike race ridden at 37 kph or something. Plus, if he falls off, it’s easier to treat the wound.
For some reason, Rich thinks this explanation will be reassuring. His enthusiasm for cycling seems to be moving beyond the worryingly obsessive into something unhinged. It’s only when my smooth-legged spouse has left the bathroom that I realise something else. I’ve been naked during our whole conversation and this has had no noticeable effect on him or the front of his new bathrobe. None whatsoever. What, not even a flicker of interest from my old friend who used to dance with hope if even a hint of areola peeped out of my own dressing gown?
From: Candy Stratton
To: Kate Reddy
Subject: Sex
Hi hon, just checking you got the testosterone patches? Trust me, they’re the best. All that perimenopausal crap will go away. Put some lead in your pencil as you get back to the office. It works for the guys, right?
Bonus is you don’t have to join all those fifty-year-olds queuing at the doctors to get hormone pussaries to keep them juices flowing!
XXO C
PS I meant pessaries, but I kinda like pussaries. Whaddya think – shall I apply for a patent?
Yes, I did get the testosterone patches from Candy. She sent them by Fedex as soon as she heard I’d got an interview. A typically generous and crazy gesture. The unopened yellow box with the More Mojo label and a picture of an ecstatic Cindy Crawford type standing on a perfect white American beach sporting a perfect white sweater and a full keyboard of Steinway teeth is in the drawer next to the furious old Aga. Every time I yank open the drawer (broken) to pull out a wooden spoon, I see ‘Cindy’ beaming at me. ‘Get your mojo back!’ begins the small print. ‘Small transparent patches worn on the skin could help with a range of problems, including depression, anxiety, persistent tiredness, reduced sex drive, poor sense of well-being and loss of confidence.’
Is that all? How about raising teenage boys from the dead in time for school, training a dog not to chew your newly upholstered sofa, tiptoeing round a stressed-out daughter, paying a builder to discover yet more intractable problems in your decrepit old house, oh, and grabbing the attention of a husband who is more hairless than a Thai ladyboy and no longer gets erect at the sight of his wife’s naked breasts. Can you help with that, Mojo Cindy?
I actually flinched when I first opened Candy’s parcel and saw all of my symptoms written down like that. Am I really such a cliché? The middle-aged mammal who once had a tiger in her tank and now has a slightly hesitant vole.
The thought of all those hormones going out like the tide, leaving my body arid and dried out. Uch. ‘Barren’ was the word my grandmother used when a woman couldn’t get pregnant. Such a cruel word, ‘barren’ – biblical in its harshness. Like a land that can’t be tilled. Like a seed that can’t be sown
. You don’t think about being fertile when you are fertile, do you? Not once in the past thirty-five years did I wake up and think, ‘Yay, I’m fertile!’ Periods were a monthly chore to be got through, a headache in every way – often a skull-splitting migraine in my case, just like my mum had – and the cue for frequent outbursts. I was a pre-menstrual monster, flying into a rage if someone so much as dropped a spoon on a tiled floor. Sudden loud noises I found particularly intolerable. What bliss to be free of all that dumb biology. And yet and yet … Poor sense of well-being? Check. Weight gain? Sadly. Depression? No. No, I’m just tired, that’s all. Reduced sex drive?
What sex drive? Signals from down below are now so intermittent it’s like one of those black-box flight recorders lost on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. Teams of men with advanced radar systems could be sent out to locate my libido and never be seen again. Come to think of it, when did Richard and I last have sex?
Oh, please no. It couldn’t be, could it? Yup. It was New Year’s Eve. Another cliché. Starting the year as we meant to go on, except we didn’t – go on, that is. Rich never stopped wanting to but, eventually, he stopped trying because whenever he moved onto my side of the bed I hardly gave him a warm welcome. Didn’t feel so much as a bat-squeak of desire. What ever happened to that magic, electrical connection between lips and loins?
‘As long as there’s nothing wrong in That Department, a marriage will survive,’ Barbara, my mother-in-law, boomed at me one day in Ladies’ Underwear in M&S. I remember laughing like a fiend, so preposterous was the idea that Rich and I would ever have problems in That Department. I would never have believed that my young, hungry body would close the department and shut up shop altogether.
So back in June, six months since I’d last had sex, I went to the doctor like all the dried-up lady hags Candy mentioned in today’s email. I’d never seen that particular doctor before. She was wearing one of those stripy, boxy Breton tops that suit no one, except possibly a Breton fisherman. She stared at the screen for some time before saying, ‘You’re forty-nine? Periods?’
‘Yes. I mean intermittently. None for a couple of months then one or two. Then none again.’
‘Perfectly normal at your age. When did your mother have her menopause?’
‘Not quite sure.’
‘Is she still alive?’
‘Yes. Yes, very much so.’
‘Better ask her. So any discomfort during intercourse?’
‘Er, well, we haven’t tried for a while.’ Embarrassed laughter. ‘But I don’t think so, no.’
‘Tch tch tch.’ The doctor clucked her tongue and I believe she may have wagged her finger at me like a teacher whose pupil has failed to complete their coursework. She turned to the computer and started typing. ‘You do know what they say, Mrs Reddy? Use it or lose it.’
Wednesday, 3.15 pm: Sometimes, when Kaylie is in the middle of one of her tooth-rottingly sweet Hallmark-card homilies to our Women Returners meeting, I amuse myself by going round the circle and planning makeovers for all the members of the group. Elaine Reynolds, for instance. Nice face, good bones, but needs to lose the straggly, salt ’n’ pepper hair halfway down her back, and get a decent cut. She thinks that long hair, probably much the same since student days, keeps her youthful but, sadly, beyond a certain point it has the opposite effect. I can imagine not wanting to ask the hairdresser to cut it off, though – we’re at an age when hair comes out in scary amounts if you just run your hand through it. Or maybe that’s just me. I’ve given up my bedtime brushing ritual in the unscientific hope that the hair that’s still there will stay put if I don’t disturb it.
I remember my wonderful friend Jill Cooper-Clark telling me that she could put up with the cancer and the mastectomy; it was the loss of her auburn crowning glory that was truly devastating. Jill, who was married to Robin – he was my boss back then – will have been dead eight years next spring. She is often in my thoughts, probably more so now because she gave up her career to take care of Robin and the boys and was thinking of going back full-time when she found the lump. Dear Robin is retired now, but still doing some trustee work in the Channel Islands. Come to think of it, Jill would have been forty-nine when she got the diagnosis; a death sentence, really. The cancer spread like a forest fire; there was no stopping it. If force of character alone were enough to survive cancer, she would be alive now. Jill is one of those people you carry in your heart, and time and death don’t change that; maybe that chamber of the heart just gets more crowded as you get older.
‘Now, maybe Kate would like to share with us her hopes and her strategies for her interview tomorrow? We are all so excited for you, Katie.’
Kaylie is looking at me with that same bright expectation I see in Lenny’s eyes when he knows I am eating toast and a crusty corner will soon be coming his way – because his mistress thinks that if she gives a corner to the dog she won’t, technically, have eaten any toast. Normally, I am highly allergic to our leader’s Californian can-do credulousness, but this afternoon I feel strangely touched, tearful even, as Kaylie and all the other women in the group smile and murmur encouragement.
Our group’s only successes so far are Janice, who, before our course really got going, was accepted onto an accountancy firm’s returners’ scheme, and Diane who, after seventeen interviews, was offered a job in an admin capacity when the original, first-choice candidate turned it down. When Diane discovered what the salary was (£18,000 pa), she turned it down too, but now isn’t sure that was wise. ‘Beggars can’t be choosers,’ she says flatly. Strictly speaking, I am the first of our clapped-out sorority to have a real shot at a professional job.
‘Well, Kaylie,’ I return the hopeful smiles with one of my own, ‘my strategy, such as it is, is to be thin enough by six am tomorrow to get into my Paule Ka navy work dress, which I last wore to do a presentation in 2007. So, sadly, I won’t be having one of the delicious brownies Sharon has brought in today. Please save me one, Sharon! I will be bearing in mind the things we’ve talked about as a group: not apologising for the experiences and skills I’ve built up outside the office environment and feeling confident that a career break has given me a new perspective which will be extremely valuable, particularly to those male colleagues who have never had to create a Mary Poppins costume for World Book Day with ten minutes’ notice. Oh, and finally, just in case that’s not enough to get the position, I will be knocking seven years off my age.’
There is an explosion of laughter followed by applause and cheers.
‘Way to go, Katie,’ beams Kaylie. ‘Way to go!’
‘They didn’t believe me. The lying about my age bit. They thought I was joking.’
Sally and I are sitting on our bench on the crest of our hill. It’s practically the only hill in East Anglia so you can’t miss it. It’s beautiful up here. We come most days to walk the dogs, the view spread out before us like a giant patchwork, with embroidery of trees and houses and a distant church spire. We watch as Lenny and Coco, Sally’s Border Terrier, play together. Lenny is all clueless, blokeish enthusiasm; Coco is more fastidious and definitely in charge. She pretends to be annoyed when Lenny gets too rough, but then yaps and looks longingly if he beats a retreat. The dogs are getting acquainted, building trust, and so are their owners. Gradually, bit by bit, Sally and I colour in the outlines of our lives.
I haven’t made a new friend for a long time, not a good new one anyway, and I’m impatient for Sally to know everything about me, my family, my life, so I hardly stop talking. Sally is more reserved, a quality I noticed the first time I saw her at Women Returners; she reveals herself slowly in acute observations, wry humour, gentle suggestions.
‘Are you quite sure, Kate? The lying about your age, I mean. Might it not cause problems down the line?’
‘Yes, it might,’ I say. ‘But I’ve thought about it and I don’t think I’ve got much choice. Realistically, forty-two is the upper age limit to put on an application form in my industry after a long break,
particularly as I have to go in at a more junior level, where most staff will be in their early thirties. If I claim I’m forty-two, they’ll just see me as older; I’m afraid that almost fifty would be a synonym for “dead”.’
Sally nods. ‘I used to love National Velvet when I was little. Remember Elizabeth Taylor pretending to be a boy jockey and winning the Grand National? And Barbra Streisand dressed up as a boy, didn’t she? What was that film?’
There is a moment of silence while Sally and I ask our respective elderly archivists to go and fetch the answer. (*‘Roy? Film where Streisand dresses as a boy? Hello?’)
‘I can’t think of a film where someone lies about their age, can you?’ asks Sally.
‘No, but Dustin Hoffman was a young actor dressing up as a menopausal woman in Tootsie because he needed a job, so just think of me as doing the same sort of thing in reverse. Not sure I could pull off being a man. If I don’t get this job at EM Royal I might have to give it a go, though. I could let my chin hairs grow instead of plucking them. Wouldn’t take long to get a nice little beard going. What d’you think?’
Sally and I are laughing so much that Coco and Lenny have come back to the bench and started barking, mistaking their mistresses’ mirth for distress.
‘You’d make a gorgeous guy, Kate,’ Sally says.
‘Well, never say never.’
Last week, I called up the CFA customer support to check if my Investment Management Certificate was still valid. I need that qualification to be allowed to work in finance. The woman who answered the phone asked, ‘What year were you born?’ When I said 1965, she made this noise. It wasn’t a snort of disbelief, but it wasn’t far off.
‘Am I rather old to be doing this?’ I asked the woman, hoping she’d say something kind to reassure me.
What she said was, ‘We have had a few people older than you,’ as though I was one of those sixty-year-olds who go to Spain to get impregnated.
It wasn’t the woman’s fault. She was being honest. By their standards, I’m practically an ancient monument. If I get the job – a big if – I can start right away because it turns out my IMC is still up to date, even if its owner is a bit rusty. If the firm gives me something more permanent I will have to get my PCIAM – that’s Private Client Investment Advice and Management – but I can study for that on evenings and weekends. I don’t need that immediately as I won’t be doing my old job. If I was still a fund manager, it wouldn’t be legal.
How Hard Can It Be? Page 11