Comfort and Joy

by India Knight

  ‘I know all of that.’

  ‘I know you know, darling, but I don’t know if you feel it. I suppose it was inevitable that at some point, at some point after you found out about Felix, there would be a part of you that wondered if you wouldn’t be happier elsewhere.’

  ‘Kate. I never thought that.’

  ‘Maybe not happier, but – better understood. There must have been a seed of doubt, I quite see that. It kills me that I planted it. There was a time, when you were a teenager, when I thought it would grow into some monstrous mutant plant. What I want to say to you, Clara, and it’s important, is this: in our case, water is thicker than blood. I can only say it subjectively, because our family is all I know. But I know I’m right. What matters is love. What remains is love. It doesn’t matter if the love comes from genes or elsewhere. And you’re making a mistake if you assume that the former is better or stronger than the latter.’

  ‘I don’t assume anything,’ I say sadly. ‘I just wanted to meet him once.’

  ‘But what do you think would have happened? Some bolt of recognition? Some sense that the universe had finally fallen into place? We don’t live in a soap opera, Clara. It’s not EastEnders. What forms us isn’t some ancient heap of genes. It’s the way we’re brought up, what we’re taught, everything we experience. And Felix hasn’t offered a single contribution to any of that. Not one.’

  ‘Here,’ I say, handing her the loo roll. ‘Blow.’

  ‘I just can’t bear that you can’t see it,’ Kate says.

  We sit there in silence for a bit after that. I understand what Kate is saying – of course I do. And I realize perfectly well that it is absurd to suddenly decide you want to do something like go and meet your father for the first time several decades too late. Perhaps it was a stupid idea – Kate certainly seems to think so. But what I liked was the possibility of it being a possibility. Now that the possibility has been removed – for all I know Felix fell off his perch last week – there is, of course, nothing I want to do more than to meet him. I suppose I could always hop on a plane tomorrow … but no. The deathbed reunion isn’t what I ever had in mind. I don’t want to slide my hand downwards to close his dead, staring eyes – I was thinking more of going for a coffee. She’s right: it’s not EastEnders. But still. It’s bothersome, all of this.

  ‘Did you feel like you were carrying out some bold experiment at the time, Kate? You know, like those tabloid headlines about how men are going to become obsolete? Did you think Felix was just sort of surplus to requirement?’

  ‘Darling, he was surplus. He didn’t particularly want to have anything to do with either of us – certainly not at the time, and not subsequently either. It made me indignant on both our behalves, and then I thought, “Well, more fool him.” But if you mean, was I conducting some exercise in matriarchy, then the answer is no. I married Julian. Children need fathers.’

  ‘Except me.’

  ‘No, not except you. You aren’t listening. Yours was utterly hopeless, so I got you another one. I thought Julian and I would stay together, Clara. He was never meant to occupy a temporary position.’

  This is the difficulty with stepfathers, I think to myself. They come with their own detonators built-in, and as a child you have absolutely no idea if – or when – the detonator’s going to detonate. So you put all your eggs in that particular basket – well, your one egg. Your Egg of Self. One egg, one basket, like one man, one vote. You put your egg in the basket called ‘my new daddy’, and you think, ‘Well, there’s my Egg of Self, I don’t know why I made such a fuss about putting it there: it’s so happy in the basket. Everything’s fine. The egg and the basket are a pretty good match.’ Sometimes this goes on for ever, in which case everybody is extremely fortunate. But sometimes something comes along and BOOM. Your egg is smashed, tipped out of its cosy basket through no fault of your own. ‘Where’s my new daddy now?’ you think, lying on the ground, which frankly isn’t a very nice thing for any child to think.

  This is true of ordinary, mummy–daddy relationships too, of course. Nobody likes a break-up. But there’s an extra level of trust involved, with new daddies. A leap of faith. You think, okay – maybe you’re the one. The last one didn’t work out, but maybe you will. I’ll give it a go. Again. And then, boom. Again. This is why, although Kate’s current husband Max and I get on perfectly well – I think she’s probably met her match – I’m pleased to finally be old enough not to mind the idea of anything going wrong between them. I’d mind for Kate, but not for me. His predecessor, Maurice, barely featured on my radar, though to be fair I don’t think he much featured on Kate’s, either.

  And then of course you have to gather up the bits of broken shell and patch your egg together again. That’s a drag too, especially when you look around for the basket and find it’s moved on. The basket is elsewhere. There are other eggs in it.

  ‘It’s enough to make you want to join a nunnery,’ I say out loud. ‘And never procreate.’

  ‘A nunnery! Can you imagine? The idea that sexual frustration can be subsumed into growing vegetables. As though saying novenas was foreplay and nurturing potatoes equivalent to going to bed with someone. Perfectly mad. Those poor women.’

  ‘It’s not ideal. But maybe it’s better than all this mess.’

  ‘Clara, you’ve gone loopy. What mess? There is no mess. Here we all are, perfectly happy. Your children are happy. You’re happy. You’re just having a strange moment, like when poor Granny had an infarct, do you remember?’

  ‘I’m not having a mini-stroke, Kate.’

  ‘You’re having an emotional mini-stroke, I think. And do you know, it’s entirely possible that it isn’t about Felix at all.’

  ‘Share your Freudian analysis.’

  ‘Christmas is always very emotional, one, and two, you feel some guilt about the Sam situation in relation to your children. Fathers, stepfathers, absences, break-ups – you’re conflating your past and their future, and not seeing that there’s no comparison. Not really. Times have changed. We’ve all evolved. And darling, I’m bored of this conversation. I’ve said my bit. I hope you digest it in time. And now I think we should probably go back to your guests. All of this emoting is rather vulgar after a while.’ She squeezes my hand, and we get out of bed.

  Ack, stress. And now Hope is drunker than she might be. It’s hardly front-page news, but I wish she wasn’t. I often wonder whether I, too, would have become a borderline alcoholic if I’d been single – as in uncommitted, not necessarily as in sex-deprived – for a very long time. It doesn’t seem terribly probable, but then I’ve noticed that it’s on the up, the drink-until-you’re-sick single-woman-in-middle-age thing. More and more of my friends are doing it – women in their forties and beyond, who go out at night and can’t quite remember how they got home. And it’s not a good look, no matter how you approach it. I love drinking, and I love being drunk, but now that the hangover from even the mildest drinking session lasts forty-eight hours, I’m meticulous about choosing where and when to do it: it needs to be really worth it. I pick my occasion and then go for it. There’s nothing worse than going out, drinking because you’re bored, going home and then finding yourself ill for two days, with only a dull evening to show for it.

  These days, though, I have girlfriends – two or three – who drink methodically, joylessly, most nights and some lunchtimes, just because it’s there and that’s what you do. You meet them for coffee at 5 p.m. and they suggest a glass of wine; you have the glass of wine and they suggest a bottle. And then another. It’s not fun, wahoo-why-not drinking; it has nothing celebratory or illicit about it. Nobody laughs. And so you say no, and you go home as they order more drink, and you think, ‘What are you going to do now, all by yourself, sitting there pissed?’ And you worry. Having said that, I’m annoyed with myself for a) noticing that they do it, and b) disapproving. It is, after all, Christmas Day. And if you can’t drink on Christmas Day … Also, I have the horrible feeling that there’s so
mething sexist in my disapproval, some sort of deep-seated, prehistoric objection to the fact that middle-aged women getting that pissed is somehow unladylike. I’m as bad as Tim last year, flipping out over my own Connaught expedition. I am a monster of hypocrisy. So that’s a bit grim.

  But it doesn’t detract from the fact that Hope is tottering about the kitchen and that, horribly, the adjective that springs to mind is ‘frail’. She seems somehow doddery, brittle-boned, old. She’s not crashing around the furniture or anything, but she’s all blurred-seeming, her gestures hesitant, her arms too thin. I hate to think of her doing it elsewhere, in bars and clubs and other places where the majority of the clientele is at least fifteen years younger than her. The problem is – and there’s a gap in the market, I always think – that society assumes that women our age are at home with our kids and husbands. But what if you don’t have either? And what if you do, and you just want somewhere nice to go and have a drink? There’s no bar or club that caters properly to the middle-aged, so if Hope and I want to go for a drink and don’t fancy the pub, we end up surrounded by twentysomethings. It’s perfectly jolly, and more aesthetically pleasing than sitting at home staring bleakly at each other from across our matching nan-chairs with footrests that flip up, but I’m not surprised it puts a downer on Hope’s morale and confidence. I wonder whether there ever comes a point where being the oldest woman in the room is actually fun. Maybe if you’re the widow of a Mafia don.

  ‘Hope, darling. Would you like me to make you some coffee?’ I ask.

  ‘I’m just finishing off this wine,’ says Hope, topping up her glass. ‘Seems a shame to waste it.’

  ‘What are you doing down here anyway? Everyone else has gone upstairs.’

  ‘Yes. I’m going up in a minute. I just updated my blog, and now I’m updating Facebook.’

  ‘Do you think … what are you saying? Can I have a look?’

  ‘Sure,’ says Hope. ‘I’m just having a chat with Phil.’

  ‘Who’s Phil?’

  Hope angles her laptop towards me. She is having a conversation with a very good-looking man who is topless in his profile picture. Maybe it was a hot day.

  ‘Do you know him?’

  ‘Phil? Yeah. Well, you know. He’s a Facebook friend. We chat a lot. Actually, Clara, I will have some coffee. No – it’s okay. I’ll make it.’

  Hope busies herself with finding clean mugs and washing out the cafetière, and I get a chance to examine the Facebook page she’s on, which is her own homepage. She’s been busy: whereas most people have posted a lone ‘merry Christmas’ or variants thereon – weariness with in-laws, exclamations of delight at certain presents, pictures of said presents and of cats wearing tinsel (‘19 people like this’) – Hope’s timeline is full to bursting with her own comments and replies to other people’s. You can tell pretty much exactly when the fourth glass kicked in. Phil wishes her a happy Christmas; Hope replies, ‘Are you going to come over and say that to my face?’ ‘Is that an offer?’ says Phil. ‘It’s a firm one,’ says Hope. ‘Firm, LOL,’ says Phil, who is clearly possessed of a marvellous sense of humour as well as a fine pair of pecs. ‘Naughty,’ Hope had just replied, before I interrupted her. ‘Get a room, you two!’ someone called Elsa has added (‘12 people like this’).

  Elsewhere in the timeline, among the YouTube clips and the imaginary gifts (‘Alan has sent you a kitten’), Hope has – and this seems to me to be a fairly intractable problem with Facebook generally – given vent to an unappealing mixture of neediness, vanity and fishing for compliments. ‘Why am I spending Christmas at my mate’s and not my boyf’s?’ she asked her friends earlier, illustrating her point with a little upside-down smiley. She answered herself: ‘Because I don’t have one.’ Two sad smileys this time. Which is okay, up to a point. But then: ‘Here’s a pic of me last summer. Am I ugly or something?!’ ‘No!’ cry her Facebook friends. ‘You’re gorgeous!’ ‘You’re beautiful!’ ‘I love what you’ve done to your hair!’ ‘Perfect 10,’ and so on. Hope – thumbs up – ‘likes’ these comments, which is good as there are two dozen of them. ‘I wasn’t fishing, btw!!’ she’s written with what strikes me as really breathtaking disingenuousness. I mean, if you wouldn’t dream of saying this stuff out loud, why write it down?

  I scroll back through the timeline and find more of the same – along with a photograph of our Christmas tree, two of Hope’s pile of presents and one of Christmas dinner with a link to her blog – and I suddenly feel quite depressed. It’s so poignant, somehow. I absolutely see that it has the potential to go right, this whole stalk-your-next-shag business – but it does also seem to have the potential to go horribly wrong. I sigh internally. The problem with Facebook is that it makes me like my friends less.

  ‘Hope? Don’t you sometimes think that this is all a bit, I don’t know, a bit …’ I can’t think of a word that isn’t grossly unflattering, so I just make an ‘ick’ face.

  ‘You were on it, I seem to remember,’ says Hope, downing half a pint of black coffee in one.

  ‘I still am somewhere, I think. I didn’t like it though – it seemed like a way for people I’ve spent years avoiding to track me down and then show me pictures of their babies. And I had to “like” the babies, otherwise it would have been mean, and after a certain point I just thought, “This is stupid. I don’t give a shit about these babies or their parents.” Also, do you remember that child who died in really monstrous circumstances last year, and you could become a “fan” of it? That kind of did for me.’

  ‘Yeah, well. Half a billion people can’t be wrong. Half a billion, Clara.’

  ‘That’s a lot of potential new friends. Or shagees.’

  ‘That’s partly the point,’ says Hope. ‘Most people nowadays meet online.’

  This is true enough. ‘What about dating sites, though? Wouldn’t they be a better bet? I mean, at least with dating sites everybody’s clear about what they’re after.’

  ‘Too prescriptive. The only men who are interested in somebody my age are in their sixties. There was one quite good one called ToyboysRUs, but after a while, you know …’

  ‘Bit depressing.’

  ‘Yeah. And I don’t have trouble getting the shags. I just have trouble holding on to them afterwards.’

  ‘I know. I wonder why. What do you say to them, Hope? Do you yell, “I want your babies” the moment they look at you?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘Do you say, “I love you” on the first, er, date?’

  ‘No. Well. Perhaps once or twice, by accident.’

  ‘Maybe stop doing that.’

  ‘I know, though actually it’s not that bad. I’d be delighted if someone said they loved me.’

  ‘You wouldn’t. You’d think, “Stop talking, weirdo.” ’

  ‘I don’t think I would. I think I’d say, “Thanks very much, I love you too.” Anyway. I don’t need your advice. I just need to meet the right person.’

  She looks at me, less blurred now but still not what you’d call sober, and her expression is not warm. This happens sometimes, with vampire friends – not a category I’d necessarily place Hope in, though given her earlier outburst, things are perhaps headed that way. The needier friends can mutate into vampires overnight, I’ve found. You know vampire friends, right? The ones who claim to love you but always leave you feeling slightly deflated. They say they’re desperate to see you and then moan about every single aspect of their lives for three hours, in minute detail, until it’s time to go home. You set off to meet them feeling perfectly cheerful and happy, and you come back feeling like crap, for no reason that you can quite put your finger on, and it happens every single time you see them. Vampire friends never ask you anything about yourself, and if you do manage to shoehorn something into the conversation (so-called: it is really a monologue) – something like, ‘I’m worried about my father’s Alzheimer’s’ or ‘My granny was run over by a bus today’ – the vampire friend says ‘Oh, bummer’ and then
uses your remark as a springboard to tell you about the state of their own short-term memory or how they still miss proper double-deckers. If you told them you had breast cancer they’d start talking about their bra collection, and if you had an axe through your head they’d tell you about the time they had a papercut. And then – and this is the really remarkable thing about them – after a while, they start resenting you. You sit there, for months or years or decades, listening to this stuff and wishing with all your might that you were somewhere else, but you stay put in the name of friendship. (Vampire friends don’t – surprise! – have many friends, which gives them another thing to moan about.) No good. Either because they can sniff out pity or because you appear to have no problems – none that you’ve ever been allowed to articulate in their presence, at any rate – they suddenly, randomly decide that you need taking down a peg or two. So the vampire friend starts telling you that X doesn’t like you, or that Y thinks your work is rubbish, or that Z thinks you could do with losing a few pounds. I wonder whether that was the direction Hope was headed in earlier, with her incredulity at the idea of my ‘having a man’. I hope not.

  Regardless of vampires, I think as I load the dishwasher – Hope’s wandered off upstairs now, still clutching her laptop – this whole question of ‘having a man’ really does render women my age insane. I understand biological imperatives, and that nobody likes the idea of being lonely, of course I do. What I’m less clear about is how going on and on, to the point of obsession, every moment of every day is going to attract people rather than send them running away screaming.

  It’s six o clock now, and dark outside. Inside, the light is yellow and comforting, somebody’s chucked another log on the fire, and we all look like characters in a feel-good movie. Some people are lying on the sofas, watching the obligatory screening of Kind Hearts and Coronets. Sam has Maisy on his lap – he is absent-mindedly stroking her hair – and Maisy – beep beep – has her new games console on hers. Jake is having a snooze, Pat and Kate have reprised their chat-howl-with-laughter-chat thing on a couple of adjoining armchairs. Charlie and Jack have reappeared because they’re finally ready for pudding – more than ready: ‘starving’, they claim.