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

by Virginia Ironside

  “I so sorry,” he said. “I come round, actually, I left something here yesterday, I no want to disturb you, actually. My mobile,” he added, producing it from his pocket.

  Extremely odd.

  Feb 19

  The phone rang and who should it be but Baz, an old friend, who only wanted to know someone else’s phone number. “And what’s all this I hear from Hughie that you’ve given up sex?” he asked, rather irritated, I thought. “I’m very upset about that.”

  “Hughie has no right to go around telling anyone that,” I said. “It’s private.”

  “Hughie’s dying, love. He has every right to do what he wants.”

  “No, he hasn’t. Just because you’re dying or old, doesn’t mean you can be bad-mannered and disloyal.”

  “Oh, shut up, Marie,” he said. “What I want to know is why you’ve given it up. Wouldn’t you just have a little try with me? You know how I’ve always fancied you.”

  I never knew he’d always fancied me and since he’s married and notoriously faithful I was rather astonished to hear it. But he went on and on, being so flattering that I wasn’t sure whether he was flirting with me or teasing me or whether he was deadly serious.

  “I want to take you out to dinner,” he said. “To discuss this.”

  “I’m going away,” I said firmly. And I was. I was going to stay with Archie. Only for the weekend, mind you, but I wasn’t lying.

  “So when will you be back?” This time I did lie. There was a scratching sound at the other end of the phone. “Can you hear me? I’m writing this down,” he said. “Well, I look forward to that. I’ll ring you when you get back. And we’ll go out and have supper.”

  I was so staggered by what sounded like an invitation for a real “date” (having not been asked out on a date for years and years) that later that afternoon, when I went to fill the car up with petrol, I opened the boot up instead of the petrol tank.

  Feb 20

  “How’s the boyfriend situation?” I asked Michelle, when I bumped into her at breakfast today.

  She looked amazingly coy and simpered. “I have met nice Polish boy,” she said shyly.

  “A genius?” I said, laughing.

  “No—yes, he ees genius. He could not finish studies in Poland to be teacher, so he here cleaning.” She looked at me conspiratorially.

  “Not Maciej!” I said. She nodded.

  “We hope you do not mind. We very quiet.”

  “But that’s lovely!” I said. I couldn’t think why I hadn’t thought of it before. A perfect match. “I’m so pleased for you!”

  “Maybe we move in flat together soon,” she added. “And you have to get new lodger?”

  February 21

  Went down to Archie’s by train. I even took a minicab to the station, which was, as usual, driven by a man who had a dreadful story to tell. He had been some kind of big cheese commander in the Ethiopian Air Force, running a department of 350 men, big pal of the king and so on. Suddenly he was thrown into jail with 23 comrades, where he rotted for two years. All of them were killed by the guards except him, and he somehow got to England and now lives in some ghastly two-roomed flat in Wembley, utterly miserable.

  Honestly, in the past all these stories were so very far away, the sort of thing you only read about in newspapers. Now they are coming closer and closer. I feel it’s only a matter of time before my crazy worries about bunions and arthritis and Gene’s feet are going to be last on my list of worries, not first.

  Very nice to be driven, anyway. Can’t be doing with driving, as these days I get so panicked on motorways, always having to work out the route on paper—M-25, Exit 5, on to A-362 and so on. It’s totally pathetic, considering I’ve driven singlehandedly across Europe and America in my time, and once even on the roads in India. Though I have to say, after my train journey, I was starting to wonder whether it wouldn’t be better to go back to the old driving method, frightening as it is.

  Behind me was a man on a mobile shouting: “I’m on the fucking train, that’s where I am! Forest Hill? No, I won’t fucking meet you for a drink in Forest Hill. Forest Hill, Forest Dump, Forest Gump! I’ll meet you in Victoria tomorrow…six o’clock!”

  At the table to my left was a young mother who looked as if she might be a personal trainer, with her three-year-old daughter. They were staring at colors in a book. The child was saying: “Blue…red…brown…yellow…” And the mother was correcting her. “Aquamarine…cerise…burnt sienna…duckegg…”

  Meanwhile, ahead of me was a gang of girls reading out problems from a teenage magazine. “Listen to this: ‘I’ve been with my bloke for seven years now and since I had my baby he doesn’t want sex with me. He cuddles up but nothing happens and he won’t talk about it. I can’t go on like this…’”

  “What’s the answer?”

  “‘Whatever the reason, you’ve got to get to the bottom of this. Cook him his favorite meal, relax him, then give him a big hug and gently explain how you feel…Perhaps he’ll open up…’ Who writes this fucking shit, anyway?”

  Archie lives in a kind of mini stately in Northamptonshire. Well, it used to be Northamptonshire. Could be anything now. Could be Clwyd for all I know. If that’s how you spell it. Or that strange place called Cumbria. Oh, for the days when Westmorland existed! There are lots of open fires, which is all very well, but it’s usually a sign that there is no central heating at all, and I realized the minute I arrived that this was going to be one of the coldest weekends in my life.

  I’d brought a fantastically small black-and-white glittery skirt and a very sexy top from Zara (only £25) but would have prefered to have worn about eight woolen dressing gowns with a hottie strapped to my middle.

  Why is it that other people’s houses are freezing? I’ve noticed that even in my house, other people start to shiver…and I shiver in theirs. It’s so funny because when I was young, it was far, far colder than this. I remember having to brace myself to get out of bed at my grandparents’, onto the cold linoleum floor. Then I used to crouch in front of a convector heater, and dress, first encasing myself with a huge undercoating of vests and long woolly pants. Now I am cold even with the central heating on and we all complain bitterly, yet none of us wears hats or gloves. I remember going to country houses when small where everyone wore mufflers, hats, jerkins—in the house! My aunt Angela used to wear mittens, a scarf and a hat while she cooked!

  A huge array of parties had been arranged, and, it seemed, dozens of other people were staying, and as I dressed for dinner, my heart sank. I would have to meet People from the Country. They hear you come from London and before you know it they’re asking if you’ve been to the theater recently. In my experience hardly anyone in London ever goes to the theater. The theater is full of tourists, Americans and People from the Country who think that going to the theater is a sophisticated London thing to do. Like lectures on Chinese glazing at the Royal Academy. Most of my friends in London rarely go to the theater or lectures, but People from the Country can tell you whether Simon Russell-Beale’s performance of Hamlet at “the National,” as they call it, was better than Ian McKellen’s Lear at “the Vic,” and, worse, take a whole evening explaining why.

  Sometimes I feel like asking if they’ve mucked out any good pigs recently, or turned over any fields to arable. But I, unlike country people talking to Londoners, am too polite.

  Luckily no one like that at supper, and a good time was had by all, even though I was sitting on a seventeenth-century chair that swayed like a lily. I was next to Archie, who said weren’t young people so lovely to talk to, but didn’t I feel sorry for them, having to talk to us.

  “We must seem such frightfully boring old ducks,” he said. “Just like old people did to us when we were young.”

  I disagreed. I am really fed up with people who are old putting themselves down as if they’ve got some kind of disease.

  “I think young people are jolly lucky to talk to you—or me!” I said sharply. “We�
��re funny and amusing, and we’ve had interesting lives—well, I’m not, and haven’t, but you have. Hold your wrinkly old head up, Archie, clench that liver-spotted fist and wave it in the air!”

  When I told him, after the pudding wine, that I probably had a date waiting for me in London, he asked: “Blind?” And I’d already responded furiously, saying: “Certainly not at all blind. He knows exactly what I look like and that’s why he’s asking me out!” before I realized what he meant.

  He looked rather puzzled and said: “But I understood from Hughie that you were giving all that a bit of a rest! Seemed a terrible shame to me, frightful waste, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

  “You must remember, Archie,” I said, gulping, “that Hughie is terribly ill.”

  I’d seen him a couple of days before coming down, and now he can hardly leave the flat he’s so weak. But all the same, what on earth does he think he’s doing, telling everyone about my private life?

  When I got up to bed, full of champagne, white wine, pudding wine, liqueurs and such deliciousness I could barely speak, I found an odd phenomenon in my bedroom. The floor seemed to be heaving, like the sea. I first wondered if it was a drunken illusion, but I discovered pretty quickly that it was the wind, howling through the floorboards, and making the carpet rise in waves. I had never been so cold in my life. I put on my nightdress and then realized that I would have to put my slip on first, then my nightdress, followed by my tights and a jersey. Even then I was freezing. I desperately wanted to go downstairs to get the cat’s rescue, but unfortunately I suspected the burglar alarm would have been put on, so I was stuck, with my teeth chattering, reduced to wearing a skirt around my neck like a scarf, and pulling up the Turkish carpet beside my bed and putting it on top of me. I finally fell into a fitful sleep.

  English country houses. So strange. The towels always have holes in them, the surface of the bath is often like fine sandpaper, sometimes with patches of green showing through, the bedroom curtains never meet in the middle. And the lavatory! Every time I went at Archie’s, I had to lift off the lid and adjust the ballcock to get it to flush properly. Then what happens if you get night starvation and want to sneak into the kitchen for a glass of milk? Quite apart from the burglar alarm problem, there’s the Laura Ashley dilemma. The famous designer of the sixties and seventies was in someone’s country house and, as I understand the story, went to the loo in the middle of the night; politely, she didn’t turn on the light, and fell down her host’s stairs, killing herself in the process.

  Sometimes I wonder if all the other guests in the house party are battling with the same demons as myself. And yet we all troop down to breakfast, after, probably, a night fighting the cold, intransigent ballcocks, lights that don’t work, dripping taps and gurgling noises in the bath, and, when asked whether we’ve slept well, we all reply: “Oh, fine!”

  I think there’d be a market for a Guest Room Kit, which you could take from house to house for your stay. It would consist of earplugs, a silken sleeping bag (just in case the sheets were last slept in by dogs), a clothes peg for keeping the curtains closed, a powerful torch to guide you to the bathroom and to read by, an electric blanket and extension cable in case there are no sockets near the bed and an eyeshade in case the curtains are made of such fashionable muslin that you’re woken by the sun at five in the morning. A comfortable pillow would help, too. And a blow-heater.

  In the morning, Archie showed us round the house. Odd. Because usually I wonder whether anyone really wants to know that the old coach-house once stood where the new library is now built. Are we really interested in the fact that the thickness of the wall between the conservatory and the kitchen shows that it was once part of a sixteenth-century icehouse? Do we really wish to be told that the roof was made of oak until Charles I forbad the making of oak tiles and insisted on slate instead? Or that the limestone to be found making the lintel in the pantry came originally from Wales, a leftover from the ice age?

  Usually the answer, in my case at least, is “Absolutely not.” But this time, I found it all strangely interesting. Archie was at his most charming and when all the houseguests were staggering downstairs with their suitcases, preparing to take their leave, he mouthed to me: “Could you bear to stay for a cup of tea?” So I did.

  “I hope you weren’t too frightfully bored,” he said, as he poured out the Earl Grey in his huge sitting room. I nearly sat down on one of his dogs, but luckily it scampered off before I could squash it. “These weekends are such fun for me, because, to be honest, it’s jolly lonely down here without Philippa. She was so good at organizing. Did you notice that the entire supper yesterday was Marks and Spencer? Fourteen King Prawn and Asparagus Risottos, and eight Lemon Tarts, not to mention fourteen portions of ratatouille…rather shameful really, isn’t it? But I’m just hopeless at cooking. I can make a piece of toast, and that’s about the beginning and end of my repertoire.”

  We gossiped about the guests and about retirement and death and, of course, Hughie and James. Surprisingly, Archie said that he thought Hughie’s attitude to death was absolutely spot-on. “I’m going to see him next week,” he said. “He’s a real Trojan, isn’t he?”

  There was a slight pause and then he said: “I hope you didn’t think I was putting my foot in it yesterday when I said what I said. But you know Hughie made it sound so drastic, that I was rather alarmed for you.”

  “Archie,” I said, “it’s for the best. I’m simply hopeless at relationships. It’s something I’ve learned as I’ve got older. I’m good at lots of other things, but not that. Either I fall madly in love with people and they don’t fall in love with me, or the other way round. It’s horrible for everyone.”

  “But surely you could overcome that if you just got together with a friend,” said Archie, sitting back in his chair. “A friend is all we really want in life these days. Not sex, especially, though it’s jolly good fun, or can be, but really what we all want is a pal, a number one supporter. That’s what Philippa was to me. Only connect—wasn’t that what that bloke, who was it—E. M. Forster—said? I don’t like to think of you not connecting. It sounds as if you’re making the best of a bad job, if you don’t think I’m being frightfully patronizing.”

  For a moment I felt touched by a huge sense of loneliness and, to my great surprise, tears came to my eyes and I could hardly speak. Then I recovered myself.

  “We’re all lonely, Archie, and once we admit that to ourselves, we’re happier,” I said. “Without relationships, and I mean sexual relationships with the opposite sex, we have nothing to lose. It’s friendship alone for me from now on.”

  “That,” said Archie, looking horrified, “is one of the saddest things I’ve ever heard you say. Well, all I can say is that I do wish you well on your blind date. I rather hope he makes you change your mind.”

  “Fat chance,” I said. “Anyway, this isn’t really a date. He’s not serious. I just said it to make conversation.”

  “We’ve known each other long enough,” said Archie, looking at me very kindly, “for you to know that you don’t have to make conversation with me.”

  And it dawned on me slowly that I was actually having a proper conversation—with a grown-up man who wasn’t married or gay. Or weird. But the minute I thought that, a shutter came down inside me. The territory was far too dangerous. Anyway, there were probably platoons of Swedish bimbos in the bushes, waiting to pounce on Archie the moment I got out of the drive. In the cupboards, hiding in the great bit stone urns in the garden, shivering inside the lavatory cisterns, concealed in the walls of the old icehouse…all lying low till they heard the door close and then springing out, like a Busby Berkeley chorus.

  “I must go,” I said, looking at my watch.

  “I’m very sorry,” said Archie, who’d now got up and had perched himself on the arm of the sofa and was looking down at me. “Let’s meet in London, anyway. I’ve loved having you.”

  “‘As the actress said to the bishop,�
��” I said, automatically, as I got up, then quickly added: “I’m sorry, that was silly.”

  Coming back to London on the train, I found myself thinking what a very nice house it was and how very nice Archie was. And then I remembered the sight of him in his beautifully cut overcoat outside Pulli and then…Marie! None of that! That way madness lies.

  Feb 25

  For the last couple of weeks I’ve been dropping in on Hughie every other day. Not for long, because he can’t cope with too much visiting. But just for about twenty minutes.

  I find it very difficult to know what to talk to him about. We can’t really discuss the future, because, of course, he has none. He is not remotely interested in Gene, but that’s not surprising, since he’s never had children and doesn’t really like them anyway.

  I sit, rather awkwardly, in the comfortable sofa, and get him cups of tea or drinks, while he sits in his big chair, sometimes breathing in additional oxygen through a plastic tube wired up to his nose, which is attached to a huge canister by his side.

  “Have to say I rather wish I could get all this over with,” he said the other day. “But it’s odd how one’s body just hangs on, fighting away for life, even when you don’t want it to. It’s like being attached to some primeval force over which you have no control. I keep telling it: ‘Give up, you fool, give up,’ but it goes on blindly fighting, like some boneheaded soldier in the trenches, obeying the orders of some force over which I have absolutely no control.”

  “You’re not turning religious, are you?” I asked rather nervously.

  “Marie! Of course not. It’s just the way our bodies are designed genetically, nothing to do with God.”

  “Thank God,” I said. Then we both laughed.

  Feb 26

  After I’d got back to London and waited a week, it was clear that Baz wasn’t going to ring, and I’m curiously disappointed. But, really, thank God he didn’t. Because if he’d pounced, I would only have pushed him away, he would have been humiliated and I would have felt like a creep. Keep telling myself how great it is to have given up sex, anyway. I hate that clawing feeling below my stomach, aching with want. I’m relieved at not having to clamber into bed with some slightly pissed pal or a young, naïve pickup, just to satisfy a craving. Sex is no longer my be-all and end-all, and when it was it took over so completely it damaged friendships, my career, my sanity.