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

by Virginia Ironside

  Rather surprised to find that it didn’t look as if Michelle’s bed had been slept in last night.

  Later

  No Michelle and no post either. The post has been completely terrible recently. I met a postman in the road who couldn’t speak English and was trying to find the police station. He was standing right in front of it.

  Maybe Archie didn’t even get my postcard, which would account for silence from him. But who cares about Archie? I don’t. No, I don’t. No, I really don’t.

  July 2nd

  No sign of Michelle today, either. I have rung her mobile but it’s just an answering machine. And anyway, when I went back into her room to look for clues, I found her mobile was actually on her bedside table, charging up. And her handbag seemed to be there as well. I suddenly had a dreadful vision of her just popping out to the shops to buy some more “products” for her face, and being lured into a van by a bunch of Romanians who were, at this very moment, gang-raping her in a dank concrete cellar.

  Later

  Still no sign of Michelle. I am out of my mind with worry. I rang Penny and she said not to worry, it would surely be OK…these things always are. But she didn’t sound totally convinced when I said that Michelle was completely naïve and hardly spoke any English. I know it seems mad, but I’m going to ring round the hospitals.

  Later

  No sign of a stray French girl at any of the hospitals. I finally rang her “muzair” in France, but that was an answering machine too, and before I knew it I’d burbled out an anxious message, with no way of retracting it.

  Finally I rang the police and to my horror they took it quite seriously. Anyone, they said, who was young and had been missing for over twenty-four hours could be treated as a missing person. Much to my astonishment I found myself sitting on the sofa downstairs, actually in tears I was so worried about her. Honestly I feel like a bird out of the Conrad Lorenz book in reverse. He was the naturalist who hatched out a bunch of ducks and because he was the first live thing they saw, they all went honking and waddling after him on their baby feet, thinking he was their mother. I, on the other hand, simply open the door to any young girl and immediately think she is my daughter. Crackers.

  Later

  Had just made a date with the police for them to come round when the door opened and a happy voice sang out “’Allo!”

  I hastily dried my tears and pretended I’d only been slightly worried, apologizing madly for ringing her “muzair.” She couldn’t have been more apologetic. She’d left her mobile at home and had stayed with her cousin for two days. Well, that’s her story. Anything but the Romanian gang.

  When the policeman came round, five minutes later, I had to hustle him out hurriedly because I couldn’t bear Michelle to think I’d been so silly.

  July 17th

  Baby due next month. Jack and Chrissie have been thinking about names. Jack says that they’re considering Stanley or Alfred—or Lester or Igor. Or Gene. Stanley and Alfred are OK, but Lester? Gene? Igor? They must be joking.

  Each one fills me with horror. I suppose I could get used to Lester. (Or is it Leicester? Surely only people in Shakespeare plays are called Leicester?) Gene sounds quite weird. It’s a name that must belong solely to the Vincent and Pitney families. Gene Sharp…cripes.

  July 19th

  Jack tells me on the phone that Stanley has been knocked out “because Chrissie’s grannie says she once knew a horrible little grocer in her village called Stanley.” Gene is still on, and when I suggest that Eugene might be a better name than just Gene, there was a long silence and I had to retreat before he had summoned up a withering reply. But Igor is still a strong contender. Surely Igor was the mentally disabled assistant of Frankenstein? They must be joking. But apparently not.

  “And what is your grandson’s name?”

  “Igor.”

  “Igor?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid so.”

  “As in Frankenstein’s assistant?”

  “The very same. But” (lamely) “we prefer to think of him as Igor in Stravinsky.”

  “Well. Er. How original. I do hope he won’t get teased at school.”

  The same old wish—the hope that he won’t get teased at school.

  I do remember Jack, five years old, once coming out of school in tears. “Mum, why am I called Jack?” he said. “I wish I were called Wayne. I wish, I wish, I were called Wayne.” At that moment, of course, I wished, too, that he were called Wayne.

  I rang Jack’s dad, who lives in Devon. “What do you think of Igor?” I said.

  “Igor!” he said. “As in Frankenstein’s assistant?”

  “Or Gene?”

  “Jean! As in Harlow?”

  Oh, God, I hadn’t thought of Harlow.

  “It is going to be a boy, isn’t it?” he said. Then he recovered himself. “Well, I suppose we could live with it,” he said. “I suppose we’ll have to live with it. There’s nothing we can do about it. Well, blow me. Igor or Gene.”

  August 1

  Garden totally dried up. Lawn looked like the Gobi Desert. Put sprinkler on this morning and totally forgot about it till this evening and garden is now a mushy swamp.

  August 20th

  The baby is due today. Wondered whether to ring Jack and Chrissie to ask what’s going on. I remember how boring it was when I was pregnant with Jack and just before he arrived, the phone ringing every five minutes with people desperate to hear the news. But I am on tenterhooks! I long to know the latest! I rang on the feeble pretext of asking if Jack wanted me to post on a piece of junk mail that had arrived that morning offering him a loan.

  “No, Mum, nothing has happened,” he said tetchily when he realized it was me on the phone, before I’d even opened my mouth.

  “Oh, sorry,” I said, feeling rather idiotic.

  There was nothing left to say.

  I feel so weirdly stressed. Lucy and Marion and James and Penny and everyone are constantly ringing me up asking if anything’s happened. This is a precursor, I can see, to the feelings of being a grandparent. No control. Then there’s the added problem of love. Might love him, of course, or might not. No love. That ghastly possibility that always lurks treacherously in the background. Oh, Lord. What if he’s just one of those frightful lumps with no hair? A great big white blob with an expressionless face and eyes that look like pissholes in the snow, as my father used to say. I mean, it could be possible.

  More likely, however, a grandchild will result in a case of extreme love combined with extreme powerlessness.

  Cripes, what a ghastly idea. Just as you consider giving up men, and find yourself free from the dreadful addictions of love and lust, another addiction creeps into your life. A grandchild. Like giving up wine, and then finding yourself hooked on beer.

  I felt utterly miserable all day, longing, just longing, for news. Any old news. News that Chrissie was feeling well. News that she was feeling ill. News that she was feeling happy. News that she was feeling down. The longing for contact was overwhelming. Never, not since I was twenty, have I waited with such longing for the phone to ring. Tried to do the crossword, but in the end felt I was staring at a Bridget Riley. Rather sick.

  Luckily Jack put me out of my misery in the evening, saying sorry. “I didn’t mean to snap this morning,” he said, “but five people had already rung and we’re getting a bit stressed out. We’ll let you know when anything’s happened, you know that. You’ll be the first, the very first to know.”

  So funny this reversal of roles. It was always me, in the past, who would console my son. Now he consoles me, reassures me, looks after me. And yet all the time he is also reassuring, looking after and consoling Chrissie.

  If I ever come back on this earth, God forbid, I don’t want to come back as a man. Actually I don’t want to come back as a woman, either. If I had to come back (and please, please God, not that you exist, just snuff me out like a candle)—if, as I say, I had to come back, I would like to be reincarnated as an olive. />
  Why an olive? Well, first you grow on a lovely tree in the sunshine in Italy, which is fine by me. Then you are picked and spend some time in a vat being soaked in oil so that all your bitterness comes out. Couldn’t be better. Then you are served up at a cocktail party and eaten by some lovely young thing. A perfect ending. And the whole cycle lasts only a year.

  Aug 24

  Jack rang me this morning. He’s born. And he’s Gene. Sounds a terrible birth. Chrissie went through hell and finally, as the heartbeat monitor showed that the baby’s heart was wildly out of control, the doctor told Jack that he would have to decide whether Chrissie should have a Caesarean or not. When Jack asked what he advised, the doctor said: “It’s up to you.”

  “But what if it were your wife, what would you do?”

  “I can’t say,” said the doctor smugly. “It is the patient who has the say in all this these days. All I can do is tell you the facts.”

  “But if she didn’t have a Caesarean, would the baby die?”

  “It’s a possibility,” said the doctor.

  Luckily the midwife was miming “Caesarean” behind the doctor’s back, by making all kinds of slashing signs over her stomach, so Jack said: “Let’s go for the Caesarean, then,” and he did.

  I felt curiously flat about the whole thing. I was hoping for a leaping of the heart, a repetition of the feeling I had when I heard that Chrissie was pregnant, but whenever I looked into my heart there was just a sign up reading “Shut.” An awful blankness. I wondered if my lack of emotion had anything to do with the dreadful feelings I’d had when Jack was born, and made the great mistake of looking in my diary. Oddly enough this was written exactly thirty-two years ago to the day.

  After the birth, which was OK, I had the horrors a few times in hospital—sufficiently bad for well-meaning doc to allow me out to “stop me feeling like a prisoner,” the result of which was a nerve-racking trip on my own round Hammer-smith Broadway, which resulted in me staggering fainting back into the ward, trembling with fear and terror of the cars, and collapsing into hysterical tears. Then I am always bursting into tears because I feel that all the good old days are gone, and that I’ll never be able to feel that Elvis is God anymore or get crushes or listen to records because they’re all unreal feelings—just an awful wallowing in nostalgia. I had a horrible feeling the other morning of suicidal depression with the awful vision of life continuing as it had done before, the only difference being this sort of pet animal I have around in the shape of Jack.

  Then, two days later, also from my diary:

  I just worry about how I can cope. This morning I was feeling I’d got enough on my hands with me, let alone having to cope with Jack as well. I should never have had him, I know, but I suppose now he’s here I’ll have to go through the motions of coping. I was so depressed this morning that I just felt like jumping out of the window. I know I won’t be a good mother. I feel nothing for him, poor wretch.

  Thank God all that changed after a year or so. After reading it, and various other grisly entries, I found I was crying with pity for myself. I snapped the book shut. Such a case of postnatal depression! I’m amazed no doctor picked it up—but then, PND was hardly recognized in those days.

  August 25th

  It is so hot I could pop. But since I can’t allow my upper arms to be seen, I had to wear a cardie over my sleeveless linen dress. Have to keep up the standards, whatever.

  Went to see Gene with Hughie and James, who were full of the news that Archie has found love.

  “Too late,” said Hughie. “I told you you should have got in there quick.”

  Apparently he has a young Swedish girl of thirty-five, whom he absolutely adores. But I was in such a state I couldn’t sum up even the tiniest twinge of jealousy. I couldn’t think straight. I took a bottle of champagne and James told me that it was Krishna’s birthday, and therefore Gene was specially blessed, and we went into the poshest hospital known to man, quite unlike the run-down affair I had Jack in, all white corridors and stainless-steel lifts—and there was Chrissie, radiant.

  “Well, well, well,” said Hughie wryly, staring down at Gene, who was lying, like a pink prune, wrapped in a little white shawl, in a cot by Chrissie’s bed. “Imagine that when you’re an old man like me, the number of people over the age of sixty-four is expected to have grown from 9.5 million to 15 million. It’s a ghastly prospect, little chap.”

  I looked at Gene but unfortunately could still feel nothing for him at all. He is absolutely tiny and has little puffy bits under his eyes, like a minuscule alcoholic. I made all the right noises, but the sight of him left me cold. I felt such a creep. Even after we’d had champagne, I couldn’t think of anything to say. It was as if my brain had shut down and my heart had just left the building. It all seemed like a dream. I suppose I shall have to pretend to rave about him. It is all so embarrassing. What is the matter with me? I felt dreadfully sad and different since James was beside himself and started crying with emotion.

  Later I told Hughie how I felt and he said: “Yes, babies leave me cold too. Ghastly things. Can’t see the point. But I bet you’ll change your mind.”

  “I won’t,” I said, mournfully. “I know I won’t.”

  August 26th

  Penny has just rung me saying she thinks she’s got prostate cancer. I only just stopped her from making a doctor’s appointment.

  August 27th

  The next day the bell rang. Thinking it was a friend I was expecting, I was horrified to find my opposite neighbor, the man who had beaten up my black friend, George.

  “Why, hello!” I smiled welcomingly, hoping he didn’t have a baseball bat behind his back. “How are you? How nice to see you!” Lies, lies.

  He stood there, like the Incredible Hulk. But his eyes were more hollow than usual. He seemed a bit thinner. He was wearing that most repulsive of male garments, a white polo-necked sweatshirt made of cotton and polyester, worn tight across his chest, showing his nipples.

  “I got bad news for you,” he intoned.

  “Oh dear, I am sorry,” I said. “What’s up?”

  He drew his arm from behind his back and proceeded to pull on a cigarette.

  “The doctors told me,” he said, “that I got lung cancer. Only got six mumfs to live.”

  Much as I feared and loathed this man, I couldn’t help being touched by a spark of compassion.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said, suffused with a mixture of pity and at the same time a vicious feeling that he had got just retribution for his frightful behavior.

  “Yeah. Well,” he said. “I’m going to fight it. That’s all I can do. Fight it.” He turned away, and as he walked across the road he looked diminished, more like a padded skeleton than an old bully boy.

  From then on I have seen him every day, sitting at the wheel of his parked mighty maroon four-wheel-drive car, smoking his cigarettes, “fighting it.”

  Don’t think Hughie will do much “fighting it” if the worst comes to the worst. He did go to the doctor’s and was put on a course of antibiotics, but James tells me his cough is just as bad as ever, so he’s going to go back to see what else is on offer.

  September 2nd

  Went round to see Jack and Chrissie, who is finally out of hospital. I thought these days they barely dragged the placenta from the womb before they chucked new mothers on to the streets, but, perhaps because she’d had a Caesarean, Chrissie seemed to be in for days. This afternoon she went up to have a sleep just after I arrived, and Gene lay quietly on my lap.

  Jack is clearly overwhelmed and overjoyed. They are talking of having a “head-wetting” in a pub rather than a christening, which is fine by me. Jack asked me about what songs I thought ought to be sung and I just sat, stroking Gene’s head. No, I didn’t feel any love for him, I thought, but there was no question: He was awfully sweet. The panic I had felt when he had just been born seemed to have disappeared. And what struck me, as I touched him, was how my own hands looked so fat, puffy and
middle-aged, like my mother’s hands. And Gene’s hands are, like all baby’s hands, so utterly tiny and moving. It is what everyone says when they first see a newborn baby, after all. “Oh, look at his tiny fingers! His tiny fingernails!”

  Jack made me a cup of tea, and Chrissie came down, exhausted, but still radiant and incredibly happy. I held Gene and patted his warm little back after he’d been fed, supporting his floppy head. He made little sucking movements with his mouth. He looks quite baffled to be here. I went up with Chrissie to change his nappy. Everything quite different to how it was in my day, of course—these days, throw-away nappies, with kind of Velcro fastenings; none of those terry-towels with nappy pins. No buckets full of Napisan. And all kinds of different creams and unguents to put on his tiny bottom.

  “Why don’t you have a go?” said Chrissie.

  What was so peculiar was finding how familiar it all was. How my right hand went instantly to his ankles, to lift him up, how I wiped his bottom with the back of the nappy, then gave him a good clean and blew him dry, and covered him with cream and powder and then lifted up his oddly thin bottom again and slipped the nappy into place—it was like riding a bicycle after one hadn’t ridden one for years. Then I picked him up and held him close, his head and weak little neck resting on my shoulder. His baby smell, a mixture of sharpened pencils and talcum powder, gusted over me like fairy dust. Later, when I looked at my watch, it was half past six, but I didn’t really want to leave.

  I drove home feeling very peculiar. And then I realized. I was so heavy and sodden with adoration for Gene that I could hardly change gear. I seemed to have acquired a great burden of love that hadn’t been with me when I had left the house. I finally made it back to Shepherds Bush, staggered in through the door and sat for a few moments, regaining my strength. I rang up Jack’s dad. It was the most extraordinary experience. When you are sixty, you don’t expect suddenly to discover that someone new has come on the scene for whom you feel overwhelming love. And instant love, as well. Not the slow-growing affection you feel for friends.