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

by Virginia Ironside

  Hughie’s got one of those faces that always looks permanently interested, and as if he secretly finds life a huge joke—which I think he does. Hughie is also a smoker, which again I find rather dishy. He always has a fag when he comes round because James won’t tolerate him smoking in the flat.

  “How’s being sixty treating you?” he asked. “Still enjoying it?”

  “Brilliant,” I replied.

  “As Bob Hope, I think it was, said: ‘At twenty we worry about what others think of us, at forty we don’t care what they think of us, and at sixty we discover they haven’t been thinking of us at all.’”

  I laughed.

  “Old age isn’t really very nice, you know,” he said, after a pause. “Being sixty is fine, perhaps, but after sixty-five, it’s downhill. I can feel it. Less sex. Puffing when you go upstairs. Having to mop your mouth all the time in case you’ve got drips…you look so young, my darling, but when I look in the mirror and see those wrinkles…I was such a golden boy, you know.”

  “You’re still gorgeous,” I said. And there was a pause after that and Hughie turned and looked at me for one of those fractions of a second that just said something but I don’t know what because he’s gay, remember?

  “Any news of the MRI?” I asked, rather clunkily changing the subject.

  Hughie paused for a moment, continuing to look me in the eye and laughed.

  “‘Gorgeous,’” he repeated. “You’re a naughty girl. When are you going to find a nice bloke? You’ve been single too long.”

  “Stop changing the subject,” I said, the teensiest bit flustered. “MRI. Dates, please.”

  “Since you insist, it’s in ten days. November 14th. OK? Now back to you and relationships.”

  I waved away the question. “All over. Relationships, nein danke. I’ve made a big decision and I’m never, ever, ever going to have sex again. The whole thing just isn’t comfortable anymore. Oh, I know you can smear yourself with creams and stuff yourself with hormone replacement pills and the juices will start flowing naturally again, but the last time I had sex I was screaming with pain, not with pleasure. And look what Penny went through with Gavin! She’s still got cystitis, you know. Two months later.”

  “Do you really mean that?” asked Hughie. “I thought that today, even the wrinkliest of specimens are, according to most of the media, meant to be ‘up for it’ till the day they die—preferably ‘on the job.’ God, I miss it.”

  “Rubbish. We women are always told to ‘listen to our bodies’…and when I listen to mine it goes, ‘Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!’ Anyway, sex brings only trouble and misery, in my experience. I’m glad to be out of it.”

  “And never a thought for poor old Archie?” said Hughie slyly. “I saw him the other day and he kept talking about how attractive you are. Come on, Marie. You can’t give up sex. You’re lovely. You’re a sexy person. You’re kidding yourself. If it’s the last thing I do—and, at the rate I’m going, it might be—I’m going to see you settled with a nice chap. You deserve one. A nice chap deserves you, too.”

  “Archie’s gone off with a young blonde,” I said.

  “No, that’s all over,” said Hughie. “He said he just couldn’t cope with the fact that she didn’t understand any of his jokes. And she tried to make him eat muesli. And insisted he had a duvet on the bed. You can imagine what Archie’s like about blankets. And she kept telling him he had low self-esteem.”

  “Archie is groaning with self-esteem,” I said.

  “I know, but you know how he pretends to put himself down all the time, while underneath he bursts with confidence. It’s an English thing. Very confusing for Swedes.”

  “Oh, well, I expect another one will be along soon,” I said. “He’s such a dish and so nice and eligible, he won’t be single for long.”

  Hughie looked at me. “You know that Archie is by far the nicest, kindest, funniest person we know,” he said. “And the richest, but that’s beside the point. Why don’t you give it a go?”

  “I’m hopeless at relationships!” I said. “At least with Archie I’ve got a wonderful friendship. Anything more and it would all go wrong. At last I’ve come to terms with being single and I’m happier than I’ve ever been before. Don’t tempt me! You’re like someone who says to an alcoholic who’s been on the wagon for years: ‘Oh, just the one won’t hurt!’ But it will! I know, darling!”

  The “darling” just slipped out.

  “I didn’t mean ‘darling, darling,’” I tried to explain, embarrassedly. “But it keeps popping out these days.”

  “Oh, a sort of Soho House, Ab Fab kind of darling?” said Hugh, smiling wryly.

  “No. Oh, I won’t be able to make you understand. It’s a kind of affectionate, but not too affectionate,” I said hurriedly, “expression, that has come upon me at sixty like a kind of disease. My speech is peppered with darlings. Darlings, not dahlings with an ‘h,’” I added. “There’s nothing I can do about it.”

  “Like liver spots?” said Hugh. “Do you know what Sophocles thought of sex at sixty?”

  “I bet Sophocles never called people ‘darling’ even when he was eighty. He was far too cool.”

  “Sophocles,” said Hugh, signaling for a top-up for his glass, “on being asked, when he was an old man, whether he still had sex, replied: ‘Heaven forbid! I was only too glad to escape from all that, as though from a boorish and insane master.’”

  “Well, I think the single life is the best,” I said.

  “Get thee to a grannery,” said Hughie. “A joke before I go.”

  “Yes?” I said.

  “Two old ladies at bridge. One says to the other: ‘I’m ever so sorry, my dear, and I know we’ve known each other for years, and were childhood friends, but I can’t remember your name. Can you tell me what it is?’ The other woman pauses and then thinks. She thinks and thinks and then she says: ‘How soon do you need to know?’”

  Hughie went into a coughing fit, banged his chest and slugged back the final glass in one gulp. “Time to go. James will think I’ve run away with a rent boy.” He got up. “Ugh!” he said, as he did so.

  “Why do we say ‘Ugh!’ when we get up when we’re old?” I asked. “Did Sophocles have a view on that?”

  Hughie sat down again. “Let me try getting up without saying ‘Ugh!’” he said. He rose silently.

  “Undoubtedly easier with the ‘Ugh!’ sound,” he said. “Do you think it’s like those tennis players who say ‘Ugh!’ when they serve? Anyway, goodbye, my dear,” he added, drawing me up to him for a hug and a kiss. “You are gorgeous yourself, you know.”

  Then he added: “It was nice when you called me ‘darling.’”

  I felt all funny when he went. But soon got over it.

  November 5th

  For a long time these past few days, fireworks have been let off. When I was small, we had them only on bonfire night. My father would buy a small box of Brocks fireworks, and we would go into the garden in the cold and he stuffed them into the earth one by one. There was a limited number of choices. Silver Rain—a conical affair that just spurted a silver shower. And Golden Rain—the same, only gold. Then there were Roman Candles—shooting different-colored stars into the air at intervals, and Catherine Wheels pinned to trees, which never seemed to work. My memory was always of my father, with a long stick, poking desperately at a tiny curled-up snake that was spurting sparks in one direction only, usually onto the ground. Occasionally it got going for a couple of seconds, just before it fizzled out. One rocket might have been included—a small affair that produced perhaps two stars. And, of course, there were sparklers. My father taught me to whizz them round and round until they made circles in the air.

  I remember the smell so well—it hung in the air, the bitter tang of gunpowder mixed with damp earth. And then, the next morning, we would collect the discarded shells from the garden, squashed and lifeless now, all promise burnt out of them, the sparklers reduced to black and gritty metal sticks.

&nb
sp; Now the sky, even a couple of weeks before the actual day, is nightly filled with showers of stars, explosions like bombs, shrieks and screams, and rockets that sometimes seem to spawn their own separate baby rockets once they launch into the night sky—circles of gold, red and blue, half blotted out by the outlines of the trees in the garden. I feel as if I’m in the middle of an attack on Baghdad, with shells exploding all around me rather than in the middle of Shepherds Bush.

  Pouncer is absolutely terrified. He comes in, ears back, his stomach very low on the ground, as if he has turned into a dachshund; sometimes he touchingly hides under my skirt in the sitting room. He’s the same with thunderstorms. As he’s an animal and presumably in tune with nature, I always expect him to be in harmony with the thunder and lightning and to sit wisely stroking his whiskers like Buddha while I, ruined by civilization, cower behind the sofa. But no. He’s terrified of everything.

  November 10th

  Wrote an e-mail to Penny, which read:

  Everything going wrong. Pouncer going mad. And have frightful hangover because Maciej gave me a bottle of wine from Poland, which, mistakenly, I drank. All is lost! Grown!

  I got an email back from her which read:

  What means “Grown”?

  Embarrassed to find that what I’d meant to write was, of course, “Groan!” Oh, Lord. Is this the way that old age is striking me? I seem to have no problem with remembering words, but no use if cannot spell ennything. (That’s a joke, by the way, a deliberate mistake.)

  November 11th

  Last night I babysat Gene for the first time. I’d suggested it to Jack and Chrissie rather boldly, saying: “He’ll be fine. You go out and have some fun. You deserve it!”

  I packed my knitting and a book about an Afghan refugee in the East End I’ve been meaning to read for ages because Hughie told me it was excellent. And, just in case I didn’t have enough to do, I popped in a new address book, which I keep meaning to copy my old addresses into. Not that, to be honest, I’m going to copy them all out, by any means.

  A new address book has always meant a big spring clean as far as friends go. And I am ruthless about expurgating the ones I don’t see that often. Death, increasingly, counts for quite a few excisions, and looking through I found that in the last few years there are no fewer than eight scratchings out due to the arrival of the Grim R.

  I arrived early, full of good intentions, only to find Jack and Chrissie in such a state of exhaustion that Chrissie was asleep and Jack told me that he didn’t think she’d be up to going out.

  “I was going to ring you, but then Gene was screaming, so by the time I did, you’d left,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Why not go round the corner just for an hour?” I suggested, feeling deeply disappointed but determined not to show it. “Just to prove you can. Like driving a car after an accident. Not that Gene is an accident, of course,” I said, and then, realizing I was getting myself into knots of confusion, added: “Well, you know what I mean.”

  Our conversation was interrupted by a great hooting outside. We got up and looked out of the big windows of their flat into the street below.

  The extremely narrow road is often the scene of a standoff, but this was worse than usual. A red car faced a small white van in the street, traffic was building up behind each vehicle and neither seemed prepared to budge an inch. Both drivers were hooting loudly, between looking out of their side windows and yelling insults at each other.

  “Looks a bit hairy,” I said. Then I thought that perhaps “hairy” was rather a sixties’ expression and wondered if Jack knew what it meant.

  Jack came over, holding Gene, who looked extremely interested in the scene outside. He was dressed in a little red one-piece sleep suit and had the air of a very clean goblin, sitting very comfortably on the crux of his dad’s elbow. He started laughing rather inappropriately.

  Outside, in the fading light, we could see the driver of the red car get out and approach the driver of the white van, who immediately got out of his vehicle to get into a more advantageous position. They started yelling at each other. Red Driver put his hands on White Driver’s jersey and started pushing him. White Driver retaliated in the same way.

  “Darling,” I said to Jack. “Shouldn’t we call the police?”

  By now Red Driver had retreated to the boot of his car and produced a hammer and advanced threateningly on White Driver. White Driver raced back to his boot and produced a car jack. As they squared up to each other I could hardly look.

  “Jack, we must phone the police!” I squawked. “This is so horrible! Someone will get hurt.”

  Jack and Gene stared down some more.

  “No,” said Jack, slowly. “I think it will be OK. Things like this happen all over London, Mum. It’s just that you never get around to see it. It’s nothing to worry about. It’ll sort itself out.”

  Just as I was thinking that perhaps the idea of babysitting was not such a good idea after all, one of the drivers retreated and, with a final screamed insult at the other, yelled at the queue behind him to start reversing and got into his car. Eventually he found a passing place. As the other driver passed him they spat in each other’s face, as far as I could see, and peace on the street was finally restored.

  Chrissie came downstairs looking extremely pretty and made-up, and eager to go out, so I got my head around this new development, and, while Jack was getting Gene to sleep, she explained everything to me. The instructions lasted for ages. She showed me his bottle, exactly how much milk should be made up with how many of which level spoonfuls of what, what temperature the boiled water should be. Then there were the nappies, the wipes, the cream and the powder. There were two sorts of nappies, the night nappies and the day nappies and I shouldn’t get them confused. There was his dummy, and his bear, and tips on how to get him to sleep if he should wake. In case the bedding in his basket got wet, I was shown where to get fresh bedding, and if he got too hot, I was told, I could pat his face with cotton wool dipped in cool (but not icy) water. I suppose, being a spa person, she knows all about water and its temperature.

  If he woke, she said, I should put him back to sleep on his side, not his back or his tummy (completely opposite to how we’d been instructed in my day, when Jack was tiny) and he liked the light just so, not too dark and not too bright. What always woke him, she said, was a certain creak in the floorboards just outside the lavatory, so if I could possibly not step on that floorboard it would be great, and it would be best not to flush the loo, if I had to go, because that also woke him up.

  If I were to go into the kitchen to turn on the tap, I should make sure I closed the door behind me because the sound of running water was a sure way of waking him, and although I could watch television, I should put his basket into the next room first, and then assemble the baby monitor.

  “Now,” she said. “The baby monitor. You plug it in here and make sure it’s on this wavelength, and then turn it to high. Then with the other end,” she added, going into the sitting room, “you plug it in here, and you make sure those little red lights are showing, and the green light is off not on, and it’s tuned to number five.”

  Finally, if anything happened at all, she explained, they’d be just round the corner in a restaurant literally five minutes away and, as well as making sure I knew both their mobile numbers, she’d taken the precaution of getting the telephone number of the restaurant as well.

  My head was spinning, but I pretended, not very plausibly, to take it all in.

  “On his back,” I said. “And monitor at number three.”

  “No, on his side, and monitor at number five.”

  “Of course,” I said. “Silly of me. And the milk, it’s six spoonfuls of powder to four of water…”

  “Three spoonfuls to three of water…”

  “And I use this bottle…”

  “No, that’s the bottle we use during the day…I tell you what,” she said, looking at me with kind, caring sympathy, as if I
were some sort of mad old lady, “I’ll write it all down for you.” Clearly I’d never be able to do her spa-selling job. It obviously requires a brain that can hold whole libraries of information all at the same time.

  I felt thoroughly humiliated but relieved at the same time. And eventually I waved them off telling them not to worry a bit, that Gene would be perfectly safe with me.

  I sat down on their extremely uncomfortable sofa—well, it’s uncomfortable for me because it’s very low on the ground; once you’re in it, you need a hoist to get you out of it accompanied by a Red Indian chorus of “Ugh!”s, as I think I’ve said before—and very quietly got all the things that I’d brought out of my bag. A few feet away, Gene was fast asleep in his little Moses basket, lined with the black-and-white material that Chrissie had found at a car boot sale. Then I tiptoed over to have a look at him. He was completely peaceful, one little hand lying above him and the other by his side. I went back to the sofa and opened my book.

  No sooner had I done so, than Gene made a kind of grunt. After the grunt he made another grunt, and within seconds, he’d woken himself up and started to cry. I tried everything. I picked him up and took him into the bathroom, where it was pitch dark, and sang to him. I offered him more milk—which I had to make with one hand, far more difficult than I imagined. But the minute I offered it to him, he turned his little mouth away from the teat, roaring with tearful rage.

  The only way I could calm him down was to walk him round the flat talking nonstop and pointing things out to him.

  “Now, let’s look at these nice banisters,” I said. “They’re painted white, isn’t that nice…and look—on the bit at the end there’s a big wooden ball…you’ll be playing with big footballs when you’re a big boy…and now we’re going down the stairs, one, two, three, four, five, six, and stepping on the nice red carpet…oh, here’s a mirror, what can we see in that…I can see Gene in there! And Grannie! Gene is in his nice red sleeping suit, and Grannie’s looking a bit distraught and knackered, isn’t she, it’s because she’s very worried that you won’t go back to sleep before Mummy and Daddy get back, and now we’re going up the stairs, one, two, three, four, five, six, past the nice white banisters…and now what else can we see…”