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

by Virginia Ironside

  “That’s my girl,” said Hughie.

  December 10th

  Went with Penny to the Estorick Collection. We discussed how difficult it was to get red currant jelly these days. As she said: “I do like jam with my lamb.”

  December 11

  Great news! When I was round at Jack and Chrissie’s, Gene actually rolled over! He giggled with delight at his new achievement. So touching!

  Chrissie was going through all her kitchen cupboards and throwing out everything beyond its sell-by date. I was standing by with a carrier bag into which everything was thrown, and which I was pretending, eventually, I would put in the bin, but secretly kept to take home. Sell-by dates! What a con! When I was young, if the toast was burnt, as it frequently was, it was scraped over the sink and eaten. Mold that developed on cheese was simply cut off, and if the pork smelt a bit peculiar, it was just washed thoroughly and cooked for a rather longer time than usual.

  Oh, dear, oh dear, oh dear, reading that back I sound like such a ghastly old person.

  Got back to put the final touches to my new bedroom plans. I am going to have it completely redecorated, get a much smaller bed—big enough for me to wallow in in luxury, big enough to accommodate one sleeping cat (Pouncer), but small enough to deter intruders. I’m going to shove it up against the wall—and then have a huge space in the middle to dance about in or just stride across or, if I’m really good, do my yoga exercises in.

  I also thought that while I was at it, I’d get a new cooker. It seemed dreadfully irresponsible because mine isn’t that revolting or hopeless, but the seal on the oven door has gone, and you need a match to light it because all the automatic pilots have got furred up. But Penny said why not? It would “see me out.”

  “See me out”?

  There’s a phrase I’ve never heard before!

  December 12th

  Asked Penny about painters, and she came up with a couple of Romanian characters who cost about £50 a day and work like beavers, as we say these days. I went through the usual agonies of feeling it unfair to hire them at such low rates, and she said that it was ridiculous, that’s what they charged and they were glad of the work and if I felt like giving them a bit more when they’d finished the job, fine. She was, however, horrified at the idea of my giving up sex.

  “What, never have another man again ever?” she said.

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s a wonderfully liberating feeling. Like giving up drink.”

  “Not that you’d know anything about that,” she said, rather acidly.

  “No, but I can imagine it. You should try it. Why, you’re not really after another bloke in your life, are you?” I asked her. “Not after Ghastly Gavin from Glastonbury?”

  “Well, it’s very unlikely, but I’d like to keep my options open,” she said. “And who knows? One of the problems is,” she added, “that ever since I became sixty, I feel invisible.”

  I feel far from invisible. The moment I became sixty I felt, suddenly, hideously visible. I can crack jokes with greengrocers, address babies in the street in a loud voice and smile at strangers. It’s amazing how many people smile back if you give them a big enough grin, even hoodies and dangerous crack addicts. It’s got to be the right sort of smile, though. It can’t be a halfhearted affair, or one of those nervous, shy sort of permanent smiles you sometimes see on the faces of old ladies as they wander around the streets. It’s got to be a big open grin, bursting with warmth.

  Luckily, I can do warmth.

  “You could always get a dog,” I said. “Isn’t that where you’re meant to meet men? Art galleries or in the park with a dog?”

  “Actually, you don’t need a dog, apparently,” she said. “You only need the lead. And then you go into the park asking people if they’ve seen Fido and before you know it men are falling over themselves to climb trees and burrow about in bushes, and then ask you out.”

  “Climb trees?” I said. “We’re not talking pandas here, we’re talking dogs. And anyway, how do you move from bush-burrowing to them asking you out?”

  “I suppose the bush-burrowing gives them ideas,” said Penny.

  “Penny!” I said. “What a ghastly joke!”

  “I couldn’t help it,” she said sheepishly.

  When I got back home I had one of those awful thoughts one occasionally has about friends—how could I possibly know anyone who found the idea of “bush-burrowing” funny? But perhaps she was thinking: How could I know anyone who doesn’t think the idea of “bush-burrowing” funny?

  Tried not to think about it.

  Dec 13

  Have to put a brave face on the fact that Jack and Chrissie and Gene are not, it turns out, coming to me for Christmas. They’re going to David’s again—but only, they tell me, because David is going to work in Australia for a year, so won’t be back next time.

  “We’ll come next year and the following year,” they promise. Probably best, actually. Because it’s only when children are two upwards that they understand what Christmas is about. I still feel obliged to get a tree, though, because Jack and Chrissie are coming over one afternoon for their presents, and I thought it would make the house smell nice, but of course I remember from last year that either I have lost my sense of smell, which I think is unlikely, or Christmas trees are now grown smell-free. I miss it so much, that Christmas-tree smell. It used to spell Christmas for me. And now it’s gone, along with all the other vanished pongs—the smell of bonfires, burning coal, fog, dirty hair, sweaty suits, the Paris métro, boiling horsemeat, and Schiaparelli’s Shocking.

  Is Christmas trees’ lack of smell something to do with the glue they spray on to stop the needles falling off? Not that that made any difference to my tree last year. Only last week, I found a whole cache of needles, which Maciej had missed, behind the sofa from last year’s tree.

  Dec 14

  As I was clearing out the bedroom for the painters, I went through all my drawers and chucked out a lot of stuff. Since being sixty, my style of dressing has gone from discreet to preposterous. But I still abide by very strict rules about dressing after middle age, most of which were given to me by my mother.

  Never wear white. It makes yellow teeth look yellower.

  Always keep your upper arms well covered. Those bits of flesh that hang down at the sides (known, apparently, as “bingo wings”) are hideous—and so are those strange rolls of flesh that appear between your underarms and your body.

  Get a new bra every six months at least and keep it well hitched-up. You don’t want to be one of those people whose boobs touch their tummies when they sit down. Or, worse, when they stand up.

  Don’t disguise a lizardy neck with a scarf or polo neck. They always look as if you have something to hide—and the imagination always conjures up something worse than the reality.

  Never wear trousers after fifty, unless they are ludicrously well cut and slinky, and never wear short skirts.

  Make sure you possess and wear the most glamorous dressing gown in the world.

  Never wear trainers (especially stone-colored ones), or any kind of sports clothes, trackie bottoms, tops, etc.

  December 15th

  The builders came to do my room. I have moved myself into the spare room—and what an education! I think there should be a “sleep in your spare room” day every year, so that hosts can find out how incredibly uncomfortable the beds are and how the floorboards creak when guests want to go to the loo at night. I discovered that the soap I’d put out in the bedroom basin was streaked with grime and stuck to the dish, there was no hook on the back of the door to hang up your dressing gown, and that the fashionable iron-barred bedhead was, while fabulous to look at, hideously uncomfortable. The bedside light worked only if I got out of bed and turned it on at the door, there was no bulb in it when I did manage to turn it on and, worst, all there was an old hot-water bottle, stone cold, lurking at the bottom of the bed, which must have been there for months. The blind has stuck so you can’t pull it down,
and the radiator hasn’t been bled for years.

  The builders are creepy. Anghel is very short and very fat with a big black moustache, and I don’t trust him; Sorin is huge, with tattoos, repulsive but weirdly attractive at the same time. Thank God I have no sexual feelings at all, or I would be fantasizing about him. He just has a sweet smile, showing hideously discolored teeth, and looks you intently in the eye—either the sign of a wonderful lover or a psychopath, in my experience.

  He has said nothing except two words. While peeling off the wallpaper, a whole pile of plaster came off at the same time.

  “Many dust,” he said.

  Was most touched to find that after one wallpaper stripping there was revealed a row of stenciled elephants, which I had done for Jack when he was small and it was his room. I stood there almost in tears. What made the elephants even more touching was that for some reason I had stenciled them in dismal gray. Why I hadn’t stenciled them in bright yellow or blue, I don’t know. Took a photograph of them to show to Chrissie. Then felt incredibly silly. Why would she be remotely interested?

  Although I normally couldn’t give a pin about health and safety, I’m slightly worried about the state of their ladder, which seems to be two sticks held together by the odd wobbly rung. All day they sing loud, wailing mountain songs. Otherwise, they don’t speak at all even though I ply them with coffee, orange juice and even bacon sandwiches. Am starting to feel irrational paranoia.

  While working, I hear them talking Romanian next door and shrieking with laughter and banging and pounding. Can’t think what they are doing because they are only meant to be wallpapering. I suspect they are digging up the floorboards and hiding caches of arms. Or bodies of dead babies.

  The day before they left, they told me, in sign language, that they had got rid of my carpet for me—something I hadn’t asked them to do, though I’d told them I was getting a new one. Why? They’ve left me with hideous dusty underfelt covered with tacks and knots. Had they spilt something on it? Sold it? Surely not—it was so grimy. Was it covered with blood from the man they’d buried under my floorboards? Had they kidnapped Pouncer and sold him for fur coats? They did an incredibly good job, but I was relieved when they went.

  Dec 19th

  Horrible moment! I was just sitting in my bath thinking how lovely it was the builders weren’t there anymore, ran my sponge under the hot tap and washed my face with it. And then—my face and hands were red and stung, and suddenly I couldn’t see. Tears were pouring down my face. After a few seconds I recognized the smell of Nitromors paint stripper, familiar from years of stripping pine cupboards in my youth and, with great presence of mind, I seized the shower head and sprayed water into my eyes, trying to keep them wide open. Eventually I could see again, but my face still stung and was red, and my hands were raw and tingling.

  I was extremely shocked. Obviously the builders had been using my sponge to clean their brushes. Suddenly I thought—what would have happened if Gene had come round for a bath and I had used the sponge on his face? When he cried I would just have thought he was feeling miserable. He would have been blinded. I got so upset that I started to cry proper tears and my head rattled with the horror of the idea.

  Dec 20

  I made a date to see Hughie when James was out pruning someone’s wisteria or whatever he does all day. Hughie was working from home and opened the door in his dressing gown, even though it was eleven in the morning. I noticed he hadn’t shaved.

  “Amazing,” he said, as he showed me in, “how when you haven’t got long to live, all decorum goes down the drain. Let me make you some coffee.”

  “Do they know specifically how long you’ve got?”

  “God knows,” he said, putting the kettle on. “Months rather than days. But how many? Who can tell? It’s a rum old business, I can tell you. Not that it matters a great deal to me. I’ve always been expecting to die one day, and here I am…on the threshold. Can’t think what those people are doing who are surprised when they’re told they’ve only a certain amount of time to live. Did they imagine they’d live forever?”

  He handed me a cup of coffee and we sat down in the sitting room.

  “Well, you seem to be taking it very calmly, I must say,” I said. “You’re setting us all a very good example. So far,” I added darkly.

  “I’m not afraid of death at all,” he said. “And do you know, I feel perfectly all right at the moment. Apart from the cough, I just feel a bit tired. And anyway, you know in one way this cancer thing is rather a relief. It means that I’m never going to get Alzheimer’s, which is a real treat. And I’m never having to do that whole suicide bit when everything gets too much, which would be incredibly difficult with James around, wouldn’t it? I bet he’d never allow me to put a plastic bag over my head and take a hundred sleeping pills. He’d always be there, watching.”

  “Or, worse, putting holes in all the plastic bags in the house, so you’d never manage to stop breathing,” I said. “I once bought a book that told you how to top yourself,” I went on. “It was called A Guide to Self-Deliverance and it was produced by a pro-euthanasia group, but it’s illegal to publish it now. But I still have it!” I added.

  “I’ll bear it in mind in emergency,” said Hughie. “In the meantime I’m ‘being brave,’ as so many people idiotically describe it. I’m not being brave at all, of course, I’m just behaving like any sensible person would behave. OK: On the minus side, I’m dying very soon. On the plus side, however, I’m never going to get cataracts or have hip replacements. Someone stuffed a thing about deaf aids through the letterbox this morning and I chucked it away with a light laugh. I’m never going to lose my memory or my teeth. I will never have to master a Zimmer frame—the list is endless, Marie.”

  “Couldn’t you get a lung transplant?” I said with a sudden pang of desperation.

  “No, they don’t do it with cancer patients apparently. I met someone in the hospital who was on the waiting list for a pair, though. Nice man. He has to find a pair that fit, however. He said that because he was big, he was more likely to get some soon, since most of the people on the waiting list for lung transplant cases are cystic fibrosis patients who are usually very small. Odd, isn’t it—waiting for the right-sized pair of lungs, like a pair of shoes. Anyway, I’m rather glad I’m not in the running for a pair.” He sucked on a cigarette and looked into the distance. “The other huge advantage of cancer is that, unlike dropping dead in the street, it means that I can tidy everything up before I go. Make my will. Leave the office neat and sorted out, and organize someone to carry on. Cancer is rather a blessing—not a word I usually use, but it’s true.”

  “But aren’t you sad that you won’t…um…” I suddenly couldn’t think of anything to say.

  “Live longer? Are those the words you’re groping for? Why should I? I’ve got no children or grandchildren. I was going to retire soon, anyway. Then what? Learn Chinese? Join a book club? I can’t read fiction. Funny thing about getting old—you want to read only historical facts or biographies. Never could understand why. No, I’ve always found life a bit difficult, you know, my dear. Bit like wading through treacle. It’ll be no bad thing to give it all a break. And I’m lucky. If James were to die before me, I’d find life very hard. I wouldn’t have anyone to row with, or to cook my meals for me. No, I’m definitely the lucky one here. It was a bit of a shock when I was told, I have to admit. But that’s about all. I’m quite surprised how I feel about it all. Quite pleased. Everyone’s very kind, so I’m being made a great fuss of. Archie is being particularly kind. I must say, he is pure gold, that man. And, of course, suddenly I’m terribly rich. I’m cashing in all my pensions and with any luck I will be able to go out with a huge bang.

  “And then,” he added, warming to his theme, “there are all the things I’ll never have to do ever again. I will never have to paint a ceiling again. I will never have to go to a godchild’s end-of-term concert and listen to her straining away at the oboe. Never have
to be driven in some ghastly old banger of a taxi on hairpin bends in the hills of Nepal, too fearful to ask the driver to slow down. I will never have to wonder whether it wouldn’t be a good idea to see China before I die. Sod China! And South America! My dear, the relief! What liberation!”

  I couldn’t think of anything to say. “Well, I’ll be very sorry,” I said honestly. “You know how I feel about you,” I added, rather clumsily. What did I feel about him? I felt like a daughter, a sister…half-fancied him…

  “And you know how I feel about you,” said Hughie, laughing. “Now neither of us has any clue what the other is talking about. Let’s leave it like that or we’ll get mawkish. Everything is as it should be.”

  Later

  When I got back I was so struck by the idea of death as a jolly good idea that I got out my old euthanasia book. To bump yourself off, apparently, you need “two plastic bags, approximately three feet in diameter and eighteen inches in width…Kitchen bin-liners are an obvious possibility…” And then, describing other methods: “Drugs and car exhaust require a secure connection between the end of the exhaust pipe and a length of stout flexible hose, which should fit over the exhaust pipe—vacuum-cleaner hose appears to be suitable…” Worth knowing if the going gets tough. But in the meantime I think I’ll hang around.

  Though I have to say that these days I’m always pleasantly surprised, whenever I wake up in the morning, to find that I haven’t passed away in the night.

  Dec 21

  Just read that when he was seventy Dr. Johnson decided to learn Italian. Surely not! I mean, it would have taken him about a million years even to get to Italy. He could barely get to Scotland, as far as I remember. I wonder if old people like learning languages for the same reason they like gardening. You can’t be made redundant from gardening, and the work never comes to an end, so there’s no moment when you feel past it. It’s to do with expanding yourself like a sponge, rather than forging ahead.