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

by Virginia Ironside

  There was a pause while it rang. Then he said: “Dr. Evans’s surgery? It’s Hughie Passton here. I want to make an appointment. Yes. Yes. Fine. Nine o’clock. Next Thursday. I’ll be there.”

  He put his phone away and I felt my eyes filling with tears. I don’t really know why. Perhaps it was something to do with wondering if he was dying, but I think, rather, that it was to do with having made a connection with someone else at such a deep level. It seemed to be something to do with love, but I couldn’t quite define it.

  Hughie put his fingers to his mouth and blew me a kiss.

  “Now can we change the subject?” he said, pouring me out a glass of red. “Can we have some pudding? Can we—oh!” he said, looking over my shoulder. “I wonder what’s going on over there! I think I see Penny and it looks as if she’s having lunch with someone most unsuitable!”

  I turned and there, sitting in front of the Whistler mural, between a fawn and a small painted bridge, was Penny, deep in conversation with a bloke I had never seen before. His back was to us, but as far as I could see he had red hair. And then he turned slightly to reveal—yes, a beard! How could she! Do hope she won’t fall in love with him and put off our weekend in France.

  The Underground was working when I finally made the journey home. By the way, who on earth ever buys or eats those repulsive grilled nuts covered with sugar that they sell at stations? Are they a cover for something? Like those sinister nail salons? Do hope Maciej’s girlfriend isn’t a member of the mafia.

  June 1

  Turns out that Michelle does. Eat those nuts, I mean. I caught her nibbling from a bag in the kitchen, at the same time as she was poring over all the so-called healthy food she has stored in the fridge. Funny how people who are into health foods, soy milk, organic bread and fresh juices, so often go mad and break out into the most revolting food imaginable. I once caught Marion guiltily eating an unspeakable raspberry ripple from Iceland. And she has the nerve to say I’m not a healthy eater! I may buy creepy identically shaped vegetables from Tesco occasionally, but I’d never eat a raspberry ripple if you paid me.

  June 4th

  Last-minute plans from Penny about our trip to France. But as my computer seemed to have crashed I had to go round to Lucy’s to look at the options that Penny had sent me. Luckily she’s working in London this week.

  Lucy asked me, rather oddly, I thought, whether I had broad beans. I said that no I hadn’t and wasn’t it a bit early for them, anyway? Turned out she’d asked me whether I’d got broadband.

  June 12

  Three slight problems with the journey to France.

  One was that you are compelled, now, to check in by yourself. It was bad enough, quite honestly, booking tickets online. I can’t see what’s wrong with people doing the work for you. They get a job and I get an easier life. But now you have to be your own travel agent, instead of having someone do up your itinerary in a nice little plastic folder and give it to you with the words “Have a lovely holiday!”

  To have to check yourself in as well was a bit much.

  I noticed some kind of official hovering about, and continued to goggle at the self-check-in machine helplessly.

  “How does this work?” I asked him. I could tell, already, that he was trained not to do it for you. He pointed to various buttons and I then declared that as I hadn’t got the right glasses on (total lie) I couldn’t see which buttons he was pointing to. I was, I explained cunningly, very old. In the end he had to do it all for me and I felt totally victorious. Why should I check myself in? Soon supermarkets will be forcing you to make your own ready-made meals.

  I paid for all this, of course, by appearing to be a fool, but it was a payment I was delighted to make. Because one of the great pleasures of age is helplessness. If my tire blew on the motorway, I wouldn’t, now, lose any pride in flagging down a bloke to help me. The days of struggling with a jack and a handbook, with one’s hands covered in oil, just to prove something, are completely over.

  Penny checked herself in with no problem at all and I think rather disapproved of my scam.

  Another blight was that going down the corridor to the departure gate (I was reeking, as usual, of about a dozen scents I’d squirted on myself in the Duty Free) an Italian girl asked me if this was the way to Turin. I couldn’t help her, but did rather wonder why she’d asked me rather than Penny—or someone else. Was it because I looked Italian, too? I preened myself. So chic! Or was it because I looked old and therefore safe? Again, I felt a maternal glow coming over me. But then I caught sight of myself in the reflection in the glass that divides the white drained people from the healthy bronzed people, walking in the other direction, and discovered the reason I’d been targeted. In my black stockings, black flat shoes and long gray jacket, I looked just like a gloomy old Italian widow, rather a different kettle of fish.

  Third problem was that sitting next to me on the plane was a man with a very black beard who read the Quran to himself in a low mutter all the way there, making me sick with anxiety. I tried to smile at him in my “Hey, I’m just a harmless old sixty-year-old!” way, but no response, just a glare.

  Only plus was that at least none of the loos had been modernized at the airports. At Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, you go in, sit down normally, then stand up and then you just can’t find anywhere to flush the loo. So, being a decent middle-class human being, you try to pull a couple of sheets of loo paper from the inexplicably heavy loo-paper machine, and lay them neatly over whatever you’ve done, and leave, expecting to murmur apologetically to the next person in line that the loo doesn’t flush. Only to find that, as you open the door to leave the loo, it explodes into a huge flushing all by itself.

  I do think modern technology has gone too far when you can’t even flush away your own poo.

  Anyway, we checked into a funny little hotel in Nice—totally unchanged since when I’d been there with my mother in the fifties—plonked down our bags and went down to have dinner.

  “Now, I want to ask you a question,” I said, after I’d ordered my bouillabaisse and boeuf grillé. We ate in one of those typically French dining rooms, full of thick-leaved plants in brass pots, with oak tables covered with plastic tablecloths, and big paper napkins with dolphins on them. “You’re not, by any chance, Internet dating are you?”

  Penny’s eyes popped out of her head. “Do you have second sight?” she asked. “I didn’t tell you one day, did I?”

  “You said you were thinking about it,” I said. “You didn’t say you’d started, though.”

  “Does it show?” she asked.

  “It’s simply that you’ve been looking rather anxious recently. And I have to admit, I did see you at the Tate with a most peculiar-looking man who just couldn’t have been a friend.”

  Penny screwed up her face in horror. “Peter!” she said. “He was the most horrible little man who’d brought a whole kit of ghastly sex toys down to London and wanted us to check into a hotel to try them out! I told him I wasn’t remotely interested. He was such a creep. He said he was fifty-six but he must have been at least seventy.”

  “Is this wise?” I asked her. “Aren’t you heading for trouble?”

  “I suppose so,” she said. “But I never meet any men these days. And I’d like to. Do you think it’s awful? I mean, just because one’s old, doesn’t mean one has to give up sex, does it?”

  “Rather you than me,” I said. “But do tell.”

  Her next hot date is with a retired philosophy professor—an Aquarian, apparently, whatever that means—who lives in Northumberland and sounds immensely civilized. For a moment I felt envious and wondered: Am I right in thinking that there are no sensible men around? Hughie’s a sensible man. And, I have to say, so is Archie. Then I gave myself a slap on the wrist. I’ve heard the argument before. “Maybe there’s just one…” But there isn’t.

  On our list of sights to see was the church decorated by Jean Cocteau at Villefranche, just down the coast. But what made i
t particularly uncanny was that I remember clearly being ten years old and literally being dragged round it by my mother, finding it all unutterably boring.

  Who is the real person, I wonder—the ten-year-old being dragged or the sixty-year-old going round full of admiration and appreciation? How many other characters can I expect to be before I die?

  One of the funny things about being old is that when you’re four years old, you can only imagine yourself as a one-, two-or three-year-old. But when you’re sixty, you’ve got a vast range of years to choose from. So one day I feel like a miserable three-year-old, the next like a girlish twenty-five-year-old, hop straight into feeling like a mature sixty-year-old and back, before you know it, to being a precocious twelve-year-old. The cast of selves increases and increases until eventually you’ve got a veritable Wagner opera of people on stage to pick from.

  June 13

  What a great place France is. The countryside is just like England used to be fifty years ago, all wildflowers and bees and butterflies; you’re knee-deep in shrews and otters. And there are all these lovely individual shops. In England we’re just a mass of Body Shops, Starbucks and Tesco Metros, while in France there seem to be no chains at all, except, of course, Monoprix, where charming clothes of all descriptions can be purchased for virtually nothing.

  Oh, dear. Suddenly realize I’m sounding exactly like Philippa’s ghastly sister.

  Bought Chrissie a very nice black and white pregnancy top, which I thought was extremely smart.

  Pottered around Nice and, as always in foreign cities, I find, we ended up going down those strange back streets, full of electrical repair shops, and places selling kitchen equipment, and tires, but finally got into the main drag, where Penny rather unnerved me by declaring that whenever she passed a hat shop, she always wondered which one she’d choose for when she had to have chemotherapy. She doesn’t even have cancer, for heaven’s sake!

  Sent Hughie and James a postcard reading: “Yesterday we went to a tiny restaurant in the old town and had scrummy lamb shanks in gravy, salad, pears cooked in red wine and a bottle of wine. The bill was seven pounds each. Yum! Yum!”

  Sent a card to Archie (about whom I’ve been feeling rather guilty since I completely forgot to thank him for the delicious lunch) saying:

  So sorry not to have thanked you for the best birthday present of all. Always lovely seeing you. Meet when we get back?

  Much love from Marie

  I mean, it would be nice to see him again. Oddly found myself wondering rather like a teenager whether to put “Much love” or “Lots of love.” “Lots of love” is something to write to everyone now, even the milkman, and it’s got rather debased. “Much love” sounds more considered and meaningful.

  June 14

  When I got back, I took the top round to Chrissie, full of exhortations not to wear it if it wasn’t right, and I was amazed that not only did she look wonderful in it, but that, despite very polite murmurings, she clearly didn’t like it at all. It slowly dawned on me that all pregnant women these days like to have their bump showing, bursting out of a tight T-shirt. What makes it all even more weird is that they like to show their tummy button sticking out, like a third nipple.

  I was rather blown away by the fact that Chrissie didn’t like it. I am usually spot on when it comes to fashion. But I really felt I had egg on my face when it came to pregnancy fashions. I suddenly realized what it must feel like to be an out-of-date old duck who buys some frightful twinset for a daughter-in-law and finds that yes, she does want to take it back to the shop to exchange it. Very humiliating. And yet I know—which is what is so odd—that were I Chrissie’s age, and pregnant, I, too, would want to wear tight T-shirts with my tummy button sticking out.

  Rather unnervingly, she asked me about birth.

  We sat at the kitchen table, over a cup of coffee, and I honestly didn’t know what to say.

  “It’s not brilliant,” I said, in the end, hesitantly. “But it’s not the end of the world, either. And you do forget it very quickly.” Forget it quickly my arse, I felt like saying. Well, I doubt if I would have actually said “arse.” I try not to be the sort of person who says “fuck,” “shit” and “arse” too much because I think it’s a bit undignified for a woman of sixty, like wearing a miniskirt with varicose-veiny legs. But that doesn’t stop me thinking “arse.”

  “Tell us what happened when I was born,” said Jack.

  I cast my mind back. It was an absolute nightmare. Some junior doctor stitched me up wrongly, I was in agony all through the night, had to have an emergency operation under anesthetic the next day and was in excruciating pain for two weeks. Not only that, but my breasts were so engorged that the West Indian nurses came round and flicked them. “Like concrete, darlin’,” they said. Occasionally, when Jack cried, great squirts of milk came shooting out of my nipples like some dreadful ejaculation. It was really horrible.

  “Oh, it wasn’t that bad,” I said lightly. “Well, the birth itself was fine, let’s put it like that.” And the very last bit was. I always remember watching my stomach deflate, like a landed parachute, once Jack had popped out the other end. “And these days, you’re drugged up to the eyebrows.”

  I refused to be drawn. Birth is so strange you just can’t predict how people will feel about it. “Why don’t we go shopping and get some stuff for the nursery next week?” I suggested, to change the subject.

  Chrissie’s already painted the room they’ve prepared for the baby, and lined a little Moses basket. The walls are covered with frescos of ducks, elephants and cats. Lying across the basket is a beautiful lacy white shawl with yellow daisies embroidered into each corner, knitted by Chrissie’s grannie. And suddenly I feel completely inadequate.

  Will it all come back to me, like riding a bicycle? Will there be new ways of child-rearing that I won’t understand? Will I be of any use to Chrissie at all, or will I be an old lady, all fear and fingers and thumbs and forgetting that above all, you must support the baby’s head at all times? Will I be stuffing bottles of boiling milk into his little mouth? Will I get the mixtures all wrong? Will he choke on a grape that I’ve given him? Will I forget to read the crucial label: May contain nuts? Worst of all, what if I don’t I love him? And yet I’m the one who’s meant to be experienced and calm. And I’m not!

  Help! Help! Help! HELP!

  June 15th

  Supper with Lucy, whose London base is at the top of a mansion block in Belsize Park. She said, on hearing my voice through the intercom: “You might find it easier to take the lift.” I notice, when I get up to her flat that she does not say this to any other guests.

  Latest e-mail:

  Spur M is the latest of all natural male-enhancement formulas, which guarantees: Rock-hard erection like “steel.” Strong ejaculate like a porn star! Cum again and again! Up to 50% volume. Cover her in it if you want!

  Golly, men are weird. They always were and they still are.

  June 16th

  Went to a movie with Penny. It was so truly dreadful that we walked out halfway through. The truth is that having seen so many films in my life, I now know exactly what is going to happen in most of them. I know how they’re going to be shot, I know everything. When I was young, movies were still experimental—and every time you went to the cinema you experienced some new thought, some wizardly fresh idea. Now, apart from the odd foreign film, about one every couple of years, they all seem the same.

  “I knew who the murderer was, didn’t you?” I said to Penny.

  “Yes,” she said. “It was the hero. Or ‘protagonist,’ as heroes are now called.”

  We checked on the mobile with James, who’d seen it, to see if we were right.

  “Hughie walked out after ten minutes,” he said. “He knew who did it, like you. But I think it’s got something to do with Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of Morphic Resonance.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Oh, you must know. As far as I know, the general drift of the
theory is that the reason you find a crossword puzzle easier to do the day after than on the day it’s published is because so many other people have done it on the day it came out and their knowledge is pooled in the great subconscious, which we all tap into.”

  “So the more people who’ve seen a movie, the less surprising is the ending?”

  “Precisely.”

  “It’s Morphic Resonance,” I told Penny, when I’d said goodbye.

  “Oh, God,” she said. “Is it catching? What’s the cure?”

  Turns out that she has her date with the prof from Northumberland on Thursday. I fear for her.

  And yet I have to admit, I envy her. Just a speck. Despite all evidence to the contrary, I still can’t help having a fantasy in the back of my mind that somewhere, just somewhere, there might be a bloke who isn’t a complete screwball.

  But, of course, there isn’t.

  July 1

  I have been keeping the old white-painted wooden high chair of Jack’s for…well, it must be thirty years. And I’ve been keeping it, let’s be honest, for a grandchild. Now, at last, I can off-load it, so I barged into Michelle’s room and tried to reclaim it. Unfortunately she has used it as a spare dressing table and the little tray, the seat and the flat piece of wood at the bottom are all completely covered with things that she calls “products.” What she wants “products” for I have no idea, since her skin is in full bloom, the skin of a nineteen-year-old, but there they all were, facial scrubs, lotions, antiaging cream for her neck (I could do with some of that—she certainly doesn’t need it). Everything seemed to be made from chamomile, avocado, aloe vera…an evil-looking plant with treacherous spikes, illustrated on every label. I tipped them all on to her bed, and staggered downstairs with the high chair.

  I bet they don’t like it. I bet they want a plastic, wipe-clean affair, which turns into a baby trampoline at the touch of a button and doubles up as a sling. But this is far, far nicer. It was secondhand when I bought it, and made in the forties…it converts into a kind of weird seat with wheels, featuring a few faded colored beads on a rod of metal.