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

by Virginia Ironside

  When he was my First Love (though he never knew it then and still doesn’t now, thank goodness), he can’t have been more than fifteen, and I’d met him at a bottle party I’d gate-crashed. Nightly I would walk past his parents’ house in Chelsea and stare in at the lighted window, wondering if he were inside. And yet, as I sat down at the table, it seemed quite extraordinary that my two roles could exist in a single lifetime. Once, when I was sixteen, shy, terrified, miserable, I used to crawl by his window like a stalker—and now, nearly fifty years later, I was sitting with him in a Clerkenwell restaurant, confident and relaxed with no designs on him at all, and simply deriving pleasure from being in his nice company for lunch. How wonderful not to be driven by a longing for company and sex.

  “Would you mind passing me the menu if it isn’t the most frightful bore?” he said to me. Then: “Oh, how splendid!” to the waiter when he brought the sparkling water. “How frightfully kind!”

  Obviously I’d written to him when Philippa had died, but I felt I had to acknowledge her death again, couldn’t really avoid it after all, and he said, in that rather sweet way that some men have when talking about something that really matters to them but they don’t want to show it: “Yes, absolutely rotten luck, wasn’t it? Still makes me blub now and again.”

  Anyway, the dishes were incredibly expensive and I felt very guilty ordering one veal sweetbread in mushroom sauce and some polenta because it cost about £21. Archie ordered lobster and black pudding cappuccino, and the waiter said: “Eez that all? Here we advise our clients to order at least three portions each.”

  When the food arrived, mine was a sweetbread the size of a thumbnail with what looked like three sliced beansprouts and one chopped-up button mushroom in a teaspoon of sauce—all served on a piece of slate! Archie’s lobster and black pudding cappuccino was a tiny bowl like a children’s tea set cup, half-filled with broth.

  Over lunch we naturally talked of old age. Our first topic was the fact that everyone we know is dropping like flies.

  “Yes, we’re getting to the difficult age,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, when I look in the obituary columns, it seems that everyone’s either between fifty-eight and sixty-five or between eighty and ninety,” he said. “Poor Philippa was fifty-nine, when you think of it. I believe that if we can get through these next few years, we’re probably in for a long stretch.”

  “You mean like in the Grand National, getting over Butcher’s Leap or whatever it is?”

  “Exactly! How frightfully well you put it!”

  Of course we got on to the subject of retiring as well, and he revealed that he had started to lose his nerve when it came to investing huge sums of money or whatever he does. And I agreed. When I’ve occasionally done the odd bit of supply teaching recently, a task that I would usually take in my stride, I feel all wobbly. I know how an acrobat must feel when she reaches thirty. OK, she’s leapt into the air thousands of times since she was sixteen, but suddenly it’s scary.

  “But we should get less frightened as we get older, not more frightened,” I said. And indeed one of the brilliant things about old age is the ludicrous confidence that it bestows.

  “I think we’re like old stags, frightened by new young bucks coming up with great antlers,” he said.

  “I don’t feel like an old stag,” I said. I was wearing a very nice Vivienne Westwood top, which I got in a sale, and high-heeled boots, and thought I looked rather glam.

  “You don’t look like an old stag! You look, if I may say so, like a frightfully young stag. A most attractive and beautiful young stag.”

  “Surely not stag, Archie…”

  “Of course not! How frightfully foolish I am.”

  My feeling is that there is a moment when too much experience works not to our advantage but to our disadvantage. We have found, during our lives, so many things that could happen, so many frightening possibilities, that we are constantly trying to avoid them, and that makes us nervous.

  “My parents, who when young thought nothing of driving across the world, and nothing of getting on a train, became petrified of travel when they got old,” said Archie. “Just going to Oxford was this huge production and put them into a total funk. That’s why old people are earlier and earlier for trains.”

  “I’m getting terribly early for trains,” I said. Instead of telling old people how young they look, perhaps the biggest compliment would be to say: “Oh, you look like someone who catches trains by only a couple of minutes.”

  “What about gardening?” I asked.

  Archie nodded gloomily. “Yes, very much into that, I must admit,” he said. “Partly the nurturing instinct—there’s no one left to look after when the children have flown the nest—but partly, surely, the realization that everything is recycled, it grows, it dies, it grows it dies…just like us. Did you know,” he suddenly said, rather irritatedly, “that apparently that runner Linford Christie—wasn’t he the one with the lunchbox? Anyway, he won something when he was the great age of thirty-two and he said that ‘Age is only a number.’ What did he mean, ‘only a number’? I bet if someone said he’d taken three and a half minutes to run a mile instead of two and a half minutes or whatever, and when he complained replied: ‘But it’s only a number,’ he’d be frightfully put out.”

  After the tiniest main course known to man, the sort of thing one might prepare for a goblin, I asked for a cheeseboard to finish off the meal as I was starving, and three pieces of cheese, transparent with thinness, like inch squares of net curtain, arrived; Archie’s chocolate mousse, a thin tube the size of half a pencil, was served on a piece of mirror. God knows what the bill was.

  But as he paid it, he said: “Well, we won’t be coming here again. Perhaps we should pop in to a Burger King before we go back?” Then he said, looking at me rather intently, “We must do this again soon. Let’s make a habit of it.”

  Soon? Habit? What on earth did he mean? I feel all peculiar. Surely he didn’t mean…? Of course he didn’t.

  Anyway, I’m giving all that up.

  Later

  Got back and popped into Michelle’s room to get the scart plug. Discovered that she has completely redecorated the place in dark pink. How I didn’t smell the paint I don’t know. Penny says that since one’s sight and hearing go down the drain as one gets older, one’s sense of smell gets more acute. Clearly total rubbish. Michelle has also fastened gold stars to the ceiling and erected a kind of deep blue chiffon canopy above her bed, which is covered with stuffed toys; it looks like a mixture of a tart’s boudoir and a ten-year-old’s bedroom. I was just about to be furious when I realized that actually it looks fantastically pretty.

  Noticed, to my horror, a couple of empty bottles of wine in her wastepaper basket. Surely she isn’t a secret drinker? Wished I’d never gone in at all.

  Odd, that. All right for me to be a secret drinker, but not OK for her to be a secret drinker. I say secret drinker. The problem is that increasingly I need one glass of wine before I can even go out and have a drink with someone. Did I say “need?” Did I say “one” glass of wine? Oh, Marie, AA, here you come.

  March 6

  Jack and Chrissie have finally had the scan, which means that at last I’m able to tell people. Unfortunately it is no fun at all, because those who already have grandchildren aren’t remotely impressed and those who haven’t got them look so pitifully envious that I feel a complete creep for sharing my good news with them. In fact I feel like someone walking about the slums of Bangladesh carrying a huge bag of cream cakes that I stuff into my mouth, one by one with a hand covered with diamond rings.

  It is, apparently, a boy. Ever so slightly sad, because having had a boy, I’d love to experience something different, and, of course, be able to dress it up in all kinds of girlie things. But there you go. As Jack says, at least it’s not a rabbit, which would be very unsettling.

  One of Jack’s friends asked him why they wanted to know th
e sex of the baby and didn’t they want to keep it as a surprise, and Jack replied, rightly, that just having a baby would be quite surprise enough, and anyway, when they were told the sex after the scan, that was a surprise in itself.

  I’m going round to see them both tonight, so I’d better get cracking with the DVD player—I can’t arrive saying that I haven’t got round to working it yet.

  Later

  Spent the entire day struggling with the DVD. I got the scart plug sorted out, and then the telly went blue and the word DVD came up…so clearly it was all working. But when I put a disc in, it kept saying that there was no disc in. I eventually drew a blank and had to ring Jack.

  “I’ve put it in, and nothing happens,” I said.

  “Mum,” said Jack, with that cautious note in his voice that I know means: “I can’t believe you’re such a total idiot.” “Which way up are you putting it?”

  “The right way,” I said. “Silver side up.”

  “That’s the wrong way up,” he said, and I could practically hear his eyebrows crashing against the ceiling.

  “But the other side’s got all writing on it,” I explained. “And pictures.”

  “That’s the side you want,” he said.

  He was right.

  What would I do without a son? If I hadn’t had a son, I would still be writing letters, rather than e-mailing. It was only because he screamed and begged me to get a computer, back in the eighties, that I ever got weaned off the typewriter in the first place, and I still remember him, at eleven years old, with his curious middle-sized hands, unpacking the entire thing and setting it up and explaining it all patiently to me as if I were some total imbecile.

  “This, Mum,” he said, showing me a piece of plastic attached by a wire to a sinister-looking box, “is a mouse.”

  Already frantic with tension, I burst into tears, saying: “But it isn’t a mouse! That’s the whole thing about these horrible computer thingies! I can’t understand it! I can’t understand any of it! I’ll never understand it! I wish we’d never got this horrible thing!”

  And I remember him putting his arms round me, laughing and comforting me, and my thinking for the first time: This is the beginning of getting old, when my son comforts me. When my son teaches me. When my son looks after me. Today it’s when we’re sorting out computers, but this is the first day of many, and it’s a huge stage in our lives, and although I don’t like it right now, it’s a necessary stage and a normal stage for him and for me.

  Anyway, by the time I went to supper with them, I’d got the hang of the DVD, though I still think videos are better because you can fast forward through videos, and it’s all peculiar with DVDs, but there you are.

  “There you are.” That’s an old-age expression if ever there was one. I don’t think I’ve ever used such an expression so much as this year, and I don’t think I ever used it when I was younger. When I was younger the whole idea of “There you are” was anathema. “There you are not!” more likely. “There you are” is an expression of complete resignation combined with gnomic acceptance. I like it.

  I scampered from the car to avoid the gangs—“scampered” not being quite the word; perhaps “hurriedly shuffled” would be a better phrase, because the feet are still not totally up to scratch after the op—and Chrissie came downstairs absolutely bursting out of her clothes, looking exhausted. They cooked me a lovely supper and I had the dubious pleasure of being shown the scan.

  Of course scans are things we never had in our day…there was no chance of knowing the sex of the baby, either. The best predictors we had involved friends hanging our wedding rings over our tummies suspended on pieces of cotton. If they went round one way it was a boy, and the other way it was a girl. Or vice versa. Oh, Lord, that doesn’t make sense. Anyway, nowadays the scan apparently shows everything. Well, it does to some people.

  All I could see, and that was both with my glasses and without, was a kind of weird blobby thing like a pool of petrol on the surface of a pond. Or, rather, like a photograph in the Daily Mail I saw last week of what was apparently a picture of Jesus discovered in a potato crisp. Though I couldn’t decipher it myself.

  Jack kept saying: “Look at his little head!” And I kept saying I couldn’t see it, until finally I had to pretend to see it.

  “Oh, I see!” I said. “Oh, how sweet.”

  “Can you really see it, Mum?” asked Jack suspiciously.

  “Yes, well, vaguely,” I said.

  “It’s not vague, it’s perfectly clear,” he said, rather snappily.

  As I drove home, I had a sudden worry. Would it be autistic? Where the fear came from I have no idea, but I knew that once I’d got this fear it wouldn’t leave me. Odd, because when I was pregnant with Jack I had no such fears. I think the whole idea of having a baby was terrifying enough, and occupied the worrying section of my mind sufficiently for there to be no room for anxiety about whether it would be OK or not. But I suddenly had this terrible fantasy of this baby being weird. And me being the only person who could spot it being weird, from the word go. And everyone else thinking it was fine—except me….

  “Now, stop it!” I told myself as I got out of the car. “Stop it at once!”

  I may have left my job, but there is still a sixty-year-old schoolmistress alive and well inside me. Forget about inner child. What you want is an inner sensible schoolmistress who stops you from getting things out of proportion. Unfortunately, when it comes to truly mind-blowingly upsetting, irrational worries like babies and autism, the schoolmistress in me often seems to have retired into a locked study to correct exam papers.

  March 20

  Have just seen an ad in a color mag for a “classic retro-style manual typewriter.” It is, claims the ad, a

  “rare classic.”

  Save £1,000 on the cost of buying a computer—it’s only £49.99.

  There’s nothing more satisfying than the click, click of a traditional typewriter…

  Makes a fabulous gift for those who remember the good old days…

  Anyone who thought it was a fabulous gift for me would get short shrift, I can tell you.

  Those “good old days…” how well I remember them. Sheaves and sheaves of carbon paper interlaced between stuff rather like Bronco lavatory paper (another thing I’m happy to say goodbye to), known as “flimsies.” Any time you made a mistake on the top copy, you’d have to go through all the back copies correcting the mistake as well. No ability to cut and paste meant that if you were writing anything of importance, you really did have to cut and paste.

  I remember my first secretarial job, before I became a teacher. I sat in a room so cold that I had to wear gloves to type—and copying anything in quantity had to be done on an enormous machine called a Gestetner. All the copies to be reproduced were typed onto wax…and mistakes had to be repaired by a strange pink wax and retyped. I still remember the groaning sound the machine made when it was in action. I also remember the groaning sound that I made while I was trying to work it.

  Who on earth would buy an old typewriter now? Oh, I know…Philippa’s sister. She’d love it. Something for people of “our age.” Grr.

  March 30

  James came over to help me hang a mirror that I’d bought at a car boot sale the other day. He was adamant that the place I wanted to hang it would drive away all the good spirits from the house because it was opposite the front door at the end of the corridor.

  “It just reeks of ‘Go away!’, my dear,” he said. “You don’t want to come in and the first thing you see is yourself coming in! Looking all shopped-out and haggard!”

  “I see the reflection as welcoming me in,” I said defiantly. “Not shoving me out. And it will reflect the light, making this squinny hall look much bigger. I think that light,” I added, with false confidence, “keeps out bad spirits, anyway, not good ones.”

  “Light, yes, but mirrors are strange things, Marie,” said James. “They are our negative opposites. Bad karma. Not go
od for chakras.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with my chakras, whatever they are,” I said crossly. “They sound like water biscuits. Anyway, are you going to help me or not?”

  When it was up, James admitted that the mirror looked so nice it couldn’t possibly do anyone any harm, which was a relief. Although I don’t believe in any of his crazy ideas, there’s always a bit of me that thinks…but what if it’s true? What if, at night, there is a chakra under my bed, waiting to pounce?

  April 10

  For the last week, I have been convinced I have throat cancer. I have woken at three in the morning, quaking with fear that first my tongue will have to be cut out, and then my vocal cords, and soon I will be able to communicate only in grunts, via notebooks and eventually in a strange American voice like Stephen Hawking.

  Luckily this morning I remembered that I had had this fear before, and after extensive tests, it turned out I had an inflammation of the throat, due to something called acid reflux. Some valve that used to shut off at night to stop the acid hurtling up one’s windpipe or whatever it is, doesn’t work so well, and one had to take some special valve pills for a while till everything settles down. It is just one of the very minor cracks and creaks that come with early old age.

  Took a couple of anti–valve shutting pills (or was it pro–valve closing pills?). And it seems to have done the trick.

  April 11

  Since I can’t worry about throat cancer anymore, I’ve now got time to be preoccupied with my current big worry: whether the baby will be OK or not. I woke at four in the morning, fantasizing myself into the most terrifying situation. The baby had been born hideously disabled, and mentally a vegetable. Chrissie and Jack loved it, but their lives were being destroyed. They wished, I knew, that it had not lived. One day when babysitting I took a pillow and smothered it. I then rang the police, was arrested and ended up in Holloway. Naturally Jack and Chrissie never wanted to talk to me again, and yet I knew they also were grateful for my releasing them, and the baby, from this terrible life. I was certain I’d done the right thing…By 5 a.m. I had set up an art class in Holloway, and was helping the entire prison with their social and educational problems…