“He could ride on the donkey,” he said. “And there are ducks in the pond. We’ve still some old toys from our brood. There’s the rocking horse. I’d love to meet him. He sounds such an enormously nice chap. But then he must be, if he’s got your genes in him.”
Tried to think of a pun about genes, but got a bit confused.
“Are you still there?” said Archie. “Are you trying to dream up a pun on genes? In the last few seconds, I’ve failed dismally. I suppose you ought to work very hard and have one glittering one you can use for all occasions.”
“He’s a bit young,” I explained. “But another time, I’d love to. What about Hughie and James? I’m sure they’d be keen to come.”
“I’ve asked them,” said Archie, “but James says it might be a bit much for Hughie.”
Since I saw Hughie only yesterday and he seemed fine, I suspected the refusal was more because Hughie, at this stage in his life, simply isn’t interested in meeting a lot of new people. What is the point, after all?
Feb 6
Woken last night by a knock on my door. When I snapped on the light I found a distraught Michelle standing in a very short green nightie, looking dazed.
“What’s up?” I asked. Oh God. Perhaps she’d smuggled the genius in and he was trying to bore her to death by reading his poetry out loud.
“What does eet mean?” she burst out. “Life? Why are we ’ere?”
Tears were pouring down her face. I patted the end of the bed, inviting her to sit down, and rubbed the sleep from my eyes. Glancing at the clock, I saw it was 3:45 a.m. I took her hand and tried to pull myself together.
“We are here,” I said, “just to stagger on. To be nice to each other. To be kind. That’s all there is to it. Life is,” I went on, warming to my theme, “one big mystery. If you ask what it means you just waste time when you could be making someone else’s life happier.”
Inside I was thinking: “Thank God my ‘What does life mean?’ days are over.”
“But ees zere not God?” she asked sadly.
“Well, I don’t think so,” I said, as kindly as I could. “Once you stop asking the question, you know, you’ll find a great peace descending over you. And everything, paradoxically, becomes clear.”
As I spoke, I could sense a great gurulike clarity come over me. For a brief moment I felt the knowledge of the ancients course through my veins.
“OK,” she said. She shuffled off, and as she tottered out of the room, I detected the distinctive smell of dope coming from her nightdress. She was stoned as a bat.
I, on the other hand, put my head on my pillow and slept the deep sleep of one who feels impregnated with wisdom and goodness. Very pleasant. I felt I had made one of those enormous psychical changes that come only once in a lifetime.
When I woke, all my gurulike qualities had gone down the drain and I was left my usual baffled self.
Feb 10
When I read the papers today I saw that they were chockablock with stuff about old people. Are old people the new young people? Seems quite likely, actually. Forget about yuppies, the acronym now (according to the Daily Mail, that is, so perhaps rather suspect) is SWELL—Sixty, Well-Off and Enjoying Life. We are, apparently, the most optimistic, most active and highest-spending age group. Of those surveyed, 80 percent said they enjoyed life, 70 percent said they felt in control and more than half claimed that their sixties had been the happiest time of their lives.
Yesterday I read about a totally different and totally ghastly group of oldies called SKIs—people who are Spending the Kids’ Inheritance. No doubt they blow their fortunes on building golf courses in their gardens, bungee-jumping, face lifts and going to cookery classes in China. Quel nightmare, as we used to say at school.
Feb 11
Question: Why is it that windscreen wipers always nearly go back and forth in time to the music, but never quite?
Feb 12
This afternoon Michelle knocked on my door and came into my room. I was expecting an apology for the other night and put on my understanding face. But no.
“’Arry, ’e ees not genius,” she announced. “’E ees idiot.”
“Absolutely,” I said, very relieved. “And are you feeling better now?” I asked. “About the meaning of life?”
“Meaning of life?” she said. “Life means notting,” she added, finally, with great certainty. I realized she had completely forgotten about coming to my room at all. “I am stoppeeng smoke,” she said. “’Arry, ’e say I try, but I do not like.”
Later
James and Hughie came round for a drink. Hughie now appears to have developed a lump of some kind in his stomach.
“When you have cancerous lumps, the words ‘golf ball,’ ‘melon,’ ‘tennis ball’ and ‘football’ take on completely different meanings,” he added thoughtfully.
“But not, sadly, the word ‘mothball,’” said James ruefully.
“Oh, for those happy days,” said Hughie facetiously, “when ‘death was but the rumble of distant thunder at a picnic.’ Auden,” he added.
When they left I felt sad. But in an odd way I can’t believe it. Partly because although he’s a bit thinner, Hughie seems just the same as he always has done. The idea he’ll die soon is very hard to take in. And, anyway, you can’t really imagine someone’s gone when they’re not gone. It’s afterwards, when you’re alone and they’re never coming back, that the pain starts stealing through.
But I do feel regret. It’s not just sadness at the absence of Hughie, it’s his take on everything. And at this particular period of life, that take is increasingly difficult to share with anyone.
When Hughie dies, there will be fewer people who recall the things of my father’s generation. Who remembers now the Quinquireme of Ninevah, John Masefield, Longfellow’s Hiawatha, “Albert and the Lion,” Gussy Finknottle, what a cohort is…who will one be able to talk to who one can assume has read all the Russians? Oh, I know that academics have, but I mean just ordinary daily people. Fewer of them about.
Except for Archie, actually…
Marion, who sometimes does reviews for the Tablet, being a Catholic, told me that she wrote an e-mail to a literary editor there about a book by some bishop, saying: “If you have no one to review it, Barkis is willin’.” The editor wrote back, saying: “I haven’t…but who is Barkis?”
That’s the sadness of getting older. No one younger knowing who Barkis is, or, presumably, who Dinu Lipatti or Peter Watson were or what the Light Programme was or where Schmidts used to be, and all of us oldies having no clue who Sade, Jade and Beyoncè are. (Beyance? Beyence?)
Archie’d know.
Feb 13
Chrissie has asked if I’ll babysit Gene one day a week because she’s going back to spa marketing part-time. I am so flattered I can hardly speak. It is just so extraordinarily lovely to be trusted with such a precious person. When I told Lucy she laughed in rather an unpleasant way. “You do know,” she said, “that according to my Guardian, four out of five families rely on grannie to work and cope, and around seven million grannies in England are involved in childcare? You’re being taken for a mug,” she added, surprisingly harshly for her. “What about what you want to do?”
What I want to do is look after Gene one day a week.
When I got to the flat, Jack and I had some coffee before he went off to some psychology course. He’s doing something—whether it’s research, a Ph.D. or an M.A. I’m not sure. Whatever, it means that next year he can start practicing. He told me about a friend of his who was madly in love with the girl who lived in the flat upstairs, but couldn’t think of how to get to know her.
“He could always go up and ask her for a cup of sugar,” I said.
“Cup of sugar?” he said in a puzzled way. “Why should anyone ask anyone for a cup of sugar? I’ve heard that expression before, actually,” he added, “but I’ve never understood what it meant.”
I thought for a bit before I realized where it came from.<
br />
“It must come from the war, with rationing,” I said. “Neighbors would ask each other for cups of sugar or bits of butter or dried eggs if they ran out before their next week’s rations arrived.”
“Dried eggs?” said Jack. “What are they?”
Honestly! Sometimes I feel like some ancient old duck being interviewed by schoolchildren for their oral history project. What are dried eggs, indeed!
He washed up but when he turned to say something to me, he saw me transferring all the contents of my bag into my cat’s rescue jacket and asked me what I was doing.
“I’m putting everything in my handbag into my coat pockets,” I said. “I feel nervous going out round here with a bag over my shoulder. Easily snatchable.”
Jack laughed. “Oh, don’t worry. You’d never get mugged in that coat.” He picked up his bag, kissed Gene, said: “Byee!” and went off.
Was the coat that bad, I wondered? I thought it was rather smart, in a beige kind of way. Perhaps I should dye it.
In the park, I pushed Gene in the winter sunshine and sat down on the grass. Gene cuddled up to me, and a man in a baseball cap who was passing by said: “There’s a little lad who loves his mum, ain’t it?” I simpered and, I’m afraid, didn’t correct him.
Only once he’d passed did I notice he was clutching a large can of Special Brew behind his back.
Nearby a huge dark gang of sinister hoodies were lurking with their bicycles. I felt frightened. Surely they wouldn’t take advantage of an old grannie and her grandson? Then I had fantasies that a knife would be held to Gene’s throat and I would have to give up his plastic ball, cloth book and pushchair before they’d release him. I was managing to divert my anxieties with this silly scenario until I saw a policeman in a bulletproof vest behind a tree, talking to someone on a walkie-talkie. Gene was sitting, picking things up from the ground and putting them in his mouth—a crisp packet, a leaf, one of those weird black seed balls to be found only in London parks.
I swooped on him, and we hurtled home.
That evening I came back feeling sated and bloated with loving and caring. A wonderful feeling, almost disgusting, like eating too many strawberries.
Later
Tonight was consumed with anxiety that Gene’s socks might be too small for him. From time to time I get worried…it’s because of the powerlessness of being a grannie. Is he getting enough to eat? Is he getting too much to eat? Is he dehydrated? Is he getting enough to eat? Too much? There is no way that any of these ideas can, of course, be expressed directly to Jack or Chrissie, because they’d rightly think I was being a gross interferer, but I don’t know a single grannie who doesn’t have these weird fears. Marion is always worrying that her granddaughter doesn’t get enough vitamins, and slips her mashed salmon and broccoli behind her mother’s back. Lucy is terrified because her daughter-in-law wants to put her grandchild in a nursery, and she says she’s read that nursery for under-fives makes children anxious and unhappy.
“But what can I do?” Lucy said worriedly to me when we bumped into each other in Waterstones at the board books section. “Perhaps,” she added, looking around the “New Books” laid out on a table, “I should try this.” She picked up a book called The Good Grannie Guide.
“You don’t need that,” I said, putting it back on the table. “There is only one piece of advice that grannies need to know and that is their twenty-four-hour mantra.”
“What’s that?” asked Lucy.
“‘I say nothing.’”
“Well, come on, tell me,” she said. “Don’t keep me in suspense.”
“‘I say nothing,’” I said. “That’s it. The advice. ‘I say nothing. I say nothing. I say nothing.’ Again and again and again.”
Actually I did say something the other day, and it sort of backfired on me. Gene was ill with a temperature and Jack was trying to get some Calpol into him, which he was resisting vociferously. I was so upset when I saw Jack forcing his head back, opening his jaws and jamming the stuff down his throat (rather like me stuffing Pouncer with pills) that I went out and bought a small carton of Ribena with a straw.
“Why don’t you put the Calpol in here and then let him suck up the juice?” I suggested. “He likes straws.”
“Does he?” said Jack rather suspiciously. He peered at me crossly. Whoops, I thought, I’ve let the cat out of the bag. I’m sure I’m not meant to buy him the occasional carton of Ribena, because it’s full of sugar, but I do. Well, twice I have, feeling very guilty.
Anyway, he looked annoyed and said it was a ridiculous idea. I then realized that I hadn’t been following the mantra. I drove home repeating: “I say nothing” again and again, hoping that I would never make such a mistake again.
So when it came to socks, I couldn’t say anything. And no one I know has ever had the socks panic, anyway.
I rang James for reassurance. Well, not just for reassurance, but when you’re low, like James, it’s always nice to feel needed. Makes you feel more in control.
“Socks too small?” he shrieked on the phone. “You think a growing child’s feet are going to be deformed by small socks? Hughie!” he called out. “Marie thinks Gene’s socks are too small! Marie, you do know that grass can grow though Tarmac, don’t you? It would take more than socks to stop Gene’s feet growing. If you think his socks are too small, go out and buy him some new, big ones!”
Feb 14th
Most odd. Maciej, who usually arrives at about ten past nine when he’s meant to come at nine, suddenly appeared at eight o’clock.
“Well, this is very nice,” I said, as I made a cup of tea. “Couldn’t you sleep?”
He mumbled something and then Michelle came down and he busied himself washing the kitchen floor.
Later
Rather odd. Got a rather nice Valentine’s card from Archie! Inside he said: “Well, someone’s got to send you one, haven’t they? Keep up the good work! Archie x”
One “x.”
Feb 15th
Bought some new socks at Green Baby and took them round to Chrissie.
“Oh, great,” she said. “They’ll go marvelously with the new shoes I just bought him. His present ones are far too small, aren’t they? I keep worrying that his feet will be deformed.”
“Oh, no,” I said, cheerily. “Grass can grow through Tarmac, you know.”
She looked at me as if I were utterly mad, and then made me a cup of tea.
“How’s Gene?” I asked, picking him up and putting him on my knee. He is so heavy! I can barely carry him now, so heaven knows how I will be able to lift him when he’s two years old, and yet I seem to remember being able to lift Jack up until he was about seven years old. “Oh, I never asked how he got over his flu the other day…”
“Oh yes,” said Chrissie. “Oh, by the way, we found a way to get Calpol down him. Jack got a carton of Ribena, injected some of the Calpol into it and he sucked it all up through a straw!”
“How brilliantly clever you are!” I said.
Feb 16th
James and Hughie picked me up and we went for tapas round the corner and Hughie ordered, at once, two bottles of vino verde, which I thought was rather bold. “One for me, and one for you two,” he said, as he helped himself to a gigantic tumblerful.
For the first time, he looked really ill. He was incredibly thin, and gasped a lot. His clothes hang on him baggily, like the skin on an old cat.
“No,” he said, noticing my face as we sat down. “I’m not the debonair devil-may-care boulevardier of old. More of a wreck.”
“He hasn’t been out for days,” said James, and that use of the third person brought it home to me how ill Hughie must be getting. “He’s been resting all day to come out tonight.”
“How’s Penny?” asked Hughie, clearly rather eager to get away from the subject of his illness.
“Fine,” I said. “She’s completely got over the frightful Gavin. Who has, of course, dropped her again.”
“What was that
book he read?” asked James. “Death in Venice?”
“Never managed to finish that,” I said.
“One of Thomas Mann’s worst,” said Hughie. “I find so often that if everyone goes on and on about how marvelous a book is, ten to one you’ve got a cold, dead fish on your hands.”
“You two are talking as if you’ve joined a book club,” said James, helping himself to a huge portion of prawns in oil and chile.
“Nonsense, we’re being much more interesting,” said Hughie. “What’s that you’ve got there? Patatas bravas? Let’s get some more. Brave potatoes. That’s us. Brave old potatoes.”
Feb 17th
Was going to the shop in my nightdress under my coat, as usual, when I met Sheila the Dealer, looking very mad indeed. Her face was covered in the kind of scabby spots you see only on cocaine-crazed top models, and she was so thin and anorexic looking it was impossible not to entertain the idea of simply taking her arm and breaking it in half just to hear it snap.
She stared at me like a terrified cat. Clearly she wasn’t aware of ever having seen me before.
“You look just like Celia Imrie,” she said harshly.
“Celia who?”
“Celia Imrie. On the telly,” she said. I had never heard of her, being, like Vivienne Westwood apparently, in complete ignorance as to who the latest celebs are.
“Well, I hope she’s wise and beautiful,” I said, rather charmingly and patronizingly. Hoping to make my escape.
Sheila inspected me for a few seconds. “She’s not too bad,” she said, and tottered on.
Feb 18
Things with Maciej have become even stranger. Got up this morning and bustled out of my bedroom door only to find him what I can only describe as tiptoeing down the stairs.
“Oh, hi!” I said, feeling, quite honestly, a bit freaked out. It wasn’t his day. Surely he wasn’t popping in with his key to burgle a few small items? A Polish friend of Hughie’s had warned me about Poles. “They are all scum!” she had said, most disloyally, I thought. But Maciej wasn’t scum. He was brainy and beautiful. “What are you doing here today?”
No! I Don't Want to Join a Book Club: Diary of a Sixtieth Year Page 19