And all I feel now is great relief that I don’t have to worry anymore about faking it or not faking it, or asking for it, or pushing him away, or whether I’ve come or he’s come…and what a relief it is not to care anymore about whether he will ring when he said he would. What a relief, too, to be able to flirt shamelessly without any risk of it going any further.
March 4
Went to the library to get out a talking book—oh, what bliss! I thought I’d try A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Proust. Might finish listening to it by Christmas. Never managed to get past the madeleine bit when I was young.
When I went to the cashpoint, I inserted my library card into the slot and was very irritated when it refused to give me any money. Oh dear, is this the beginning of the end?
March 6
Penny rang me up in great excitement. It turns out that Lisa has remet her first boyfriend ever and they’ve decided, within about three weeks, to get married.
“He’s such a darling! I always liked him best!” she said. “And now I’ll have grandchildren!”
As a result, she had her financial adviser round to tell her how best to manage the paltry savings she has now, and also to tell her how much—or how little—she has in pensions. “Or,” she said rather crossly on the phone, “pension. Why do they always make it singular?”
“No idea,” I said. “But will you be able to exist in your old age? Your even older age, I mean? Without selling the house?”
“Apparently. He said that I should look at my financial investments as a cake. Why do they always say that? I’ve never looked at a cake and thought of it as my financial investments, have you?”
March 10
To my utter fury, Praise the Lord! Inc. has got planning permission. But after that fury had passed, I realize that the best thing to do is to make friends with the pastor, a giant Jamaican man called Father Emmanuel, who has already started painting the outside of the building. As I passed by today, Father Emmanuel grinned down at me from the top of his ladder.
“I will come and have tea with you,” he said, beaming. “We are so pleased to be here to spread the word of the Lord. And you will not hear us, I give you the word of the Lord. Everything is soundproofed. Thank the Lord. We are lucky to have such wonderful neighbors.”
Since he must know that I am the person who initiated all the objections to his getting the property, I am inordinately touched by his generosity of spirit, and go back home wondering if there might not be something in this Christianity business after all. Then give myself a sharp slap on the wrist and tell myself to pull myself together.
April 2
Went with Gene to the park in Brixton. There was no one in the playground except one small black boy of seven. His name was Tom. There we were, the three of us, standing on the rubbery Tarmac, in the cold wind. Gene was holding on to the inside of some kind of colored piece of wooden construction and toppling over, and Tom, who was far too big for it, was clambering all over it, calling him. “Gene! I’m here!” Tom was very kind to Gene, and lifted him up the steps and guided him down the slide.
When I spoke to him, it turned out that he was spending the whole day alone because his family had gone to hospital with his mother. He had, apparently, no father. When I asked what was wrong with her, I discovered that she was in a wheelchair, unable to move, or speak. His sister lived with them as well. She was sixteen and had a baby. Also his auntie who is on benefits. They all live together in a two-room flat on one of the grimmest estates nearby. Eventually I took Gene back in his comfortable pushchair, sucking his bottle, to Chrissie and Jack’s centrally heated, spacious, happy flat, and we put on a DVD and watched Boobah. Thinking of that lonesome little black boy, I felt my heart would break.
Only connect, I thought. How well I connect with Gene. And I connect with that sad little boy, too. Yet how badly I connect with men.
Archie’s voice came floating into my head. “We’ve known each other long enough,” he was saying. “You don’t have to make conversation with me.”
April 3rd
Lisa came up to London, determined to buy a retro wedding dress. Penny insisted I come to help them choose something from Steinburg and Tolkien, a shop in the King’s Road, with an amazing basement vault bursting with beautiful—and slightly smelly—retro clothes from the forties, fifties and sixties. Penny and I rushed about clutching at skirts and tops saying: “But didn’t you have one like this in the sixties?” “I remember trying to copy that Ossie dress by getting a vest from Pontings and dyeing it…” “Oh, look, a Bazaar skirt! Always far too expensive for me!” “But didn’t you have this Biba trouser suit? I’m sure I remember you wearing it…” “Could it be mine?” “Oh, look at this Courrèges mac!”
Finally Lisa picked a very nice dress by Zandra Rhodes, and Penny and I were oohing and aaahing and remembering the parties we used to go to dressed in the same clothes. It was all utterly bizarre. Or Bazaar, as Penny said. “Pretty quaint—or Quant, too,” I said. When we rolled about laughing Lisa said to her mum in a low voice: “Oh, do keep quiet. It’s so embarrassing!”
Determined to wriggle out of the wedding. I used to love weddings, but now I find them utterly miserable affairs. Firstly you’re fairly sure the couple’s going to get divorced pretty snappily and secondly, it’s so grisly having to meet all those other relations and godparents. The last time I was at a wedding, I sat next to the wife of the second cousin once removed of the groom’s father, who was madly in favor of the Iraq war, and on the other side was just an empty space—some creep who hadn’t turned up. And we were all sitting! Couldn’t escape.
Funerals, on the other hand, are much jollier affairs. They’re a coming together of people to fill the space left by the dead person. We are all warm to each other, warm with sadness, not prickly and suspicious like we are at weddings. Well, I am.
Soon Hughie will die, of course. And I will be at his funeral. Must ask him what he wants. It’ll give us something to talk about.
April 5th
Hughie was better today. At least he was dressed and coping without the oxygen. It didn’t seem the moment to bring up the subject of funerals, but he brought it up himself.
“You wouldn’t do the address, would you, Marie?” he said. “James says he’s too shy to ask you.”
“Of course I will, Hughie,” I said, putting my arms round his shoulders. It’s so sad. He’s all bony under his clothes, like a skeleton.
“You can be ruthlessly honest,” he said. “I won’t be there to hear it.”
“If you were, I promise you, your ears would burn,” I said. “Are you arranging it all in advance?”
“Yes, I am, actually,” said Hughie. “Normally I think it’s a bit unfair, don’t you, to plan one’s funeral in advance? When someone’s died, the people left behind like having something to do, wondering which tune to sing psalm twenty-three to, things like that. But for us, it gives James and me something to talk about. Conversation’s very difficult when you’re dying, you know. You suddenly realize how much of it is dependent on the future. Anyway, I have got a future, and it’s funeral-shaped, so James and I spend long hours in the evening reading out suitable passages from Cicero and Tacitus, and listening to the most wonderful pieces of Monteverdi, and he cries and I just lie back and enjoy it all.” There was a pause. Then Hughie said: “You know what James said the other day?”
“No.”
“He asked if I wanted the funeral to be a celebration of my life! Imagine! Fuck celebration! I want everyone to be crying their eyes out!”
“Quite right!” I said.
“And none of that Canon Holland crap, either,” he said. “How does it go? ‘Death is nothing at all? All is well? I am only in the next room?’ I can tell you, I will not be in the next room if I can possibly help it.”
April 20
Penny’s been told by the financial adviser that, like a surprising number of old people, far from owning only paltry savings, she is actually rolling in
money (“The gray pound,” I said to Penny. “The silver pound,” she snapped back). So now, desperate to get a better-shaped body with which to attract younger men, Penny has got a personal trainer called Friedrich. He is a muscular German with hair in a ponytail who, apparently, turns up dressed only in shorts and a vest and puts her through the most grueling routines.
“He wanted to go jogging round the block,” she confided. “But I said no, I couldn’t face it. It’s so humiliating to be seen trying to get fit. I might meet someone I know in the street. I might meet you!”
April 21
Went shopping with Marion in Kensington High Street, and found a toy shop. Funny that a while ago Marion and I would have been shopping for clothes or antiques, and now all we do is go into toy shops looking for amusing presents for our grandchildren.
We looked at everything in the under-two age range, and I bought Gene a plastic thing that makes all kinds of noises. There are red, yellow, green and orange buttons and when you press them a frightful, raucous American voice yells out “RA-A-AD! YALLO! GRAIN!” followed by a peculiar color called “ORNCH!”
We had a cup of coffee in the local horrible Starbucks, and she showed me a picture of her and her granddaughter. Very sweet but, naturally, since she isn’t mine, it left me completely cold.
“Oh, what a darling!” I cooed. “And look at you, too!”
“Yes,” said Marion, wryly, putting the photograph away. “Funny, isn’t it, how you can come to terms yourself with being old, but never come to terms with photographs of yourself looking old. Still, we’re so lucky. That joy—it’s so utterly surprising. Did you hear that grandchildren are the reward you get for not killing your children?”
I laughed politely but actually I’ve never felt like killing Jack—except a couple of times when he was about Gene’s age, of course.
“What I love about being a grannie,” she added enthusiastically, “is being able to do more for my daughter. When children leave home, you’ve got all this pent-up nurturing love inside you. It’s left waiting, behind a big dam. Then, a grandchild arrives! Out flows all the love, like from a river that has got all clogged up with middle age, bits of old bracken, muddy scum, odd pieces of flotsam and jetsam. Now it bursts through, clear and sparkling again. I love feeling suddenly that I can give something to the future!” she added, her face glowing. “I love it, I love her! When I look at her tiny face I can already see in her the old lady she will become!”
Don’t know how Marion manages to do everything. I love her, but she’s one of those old people I don’t want to be. She’s on the board of her local health committee, raising money for a school in India, caring for her crippled mother, looks after her granddaughter when she can and she’s doing a degree in philosophy and eighteenth-century pottery through the University of the Third Age (“Third Age”—there’s a euphemism! Why not just call it University for the Old?).
What I say is: Hasn’t she got anything better to do with her time?
Got back to find this e-mail:
University Diplomas
Obtain a prosperous future, money-earning power, and the prestige that comes with having the career position you’ve always dreamed of. Diplomas from Prestigious non-accredited universities based on your present knowledge and life experience.
If you qualify, no required tests, classes, books or examination.
Bachelors’, Master’s, MBA’s, Doctorate and PhD degrees available in your field.
Confidentiality assured
Call now to receive your diploma within seven days.
Strongly tempted to buy one and tell Marion: “I’ve got a Ph.D. in a week. So ner!”
April 22
Hughie’s had to go into hospital for some kind of treatment. A blood transfusion? I went to see him. On the way, I passed a huge giant of a man, covered in dirt, standing on his head in the middle of the pavement in the street, chanting the Lord’s Prayer.
Felt rather faint and peculiar as I walked into the hospital, past all the people in wheelchairs and patients on crutches, frantically grabbing as many smokes as they could before heading back into their various wards. I went up in the huge lift—huge enough to transport prone bodies. Hospital is such an alien place for most of us, and usually signals the existence of an unpleasant problem, that we view it all with greater clarity than most things in our lives. The gray color of the walls. The frantically jolly artwork, put up to raise morale. The strange bins for mysterious objects called Sharps. (Hope I won’t end up in there one day.)
Then the ward itself. All those colored patterned curtains, a landscape like a picture by Vuillard. And then the way you scan the beds. Could that yellow-looking skeleton be Hughie? Could that gray-faced corpse be him? Or would he be looking jovial and twinkly, assuring us that it was all a mistake?
I only recognized him because James was sitting next to him, holding his hand. He wasn’t really Hughie, more of a shape. He was sitting in a chair, completely covered with a yellow-gray blanket, which was draped over his head. He was breathing through oxygen tubes, his mouth scabby and parched, and his eyes sunk right into his head. Breathing was difficult for him, and although he recognized me, he could hardly manage more than a glimmer of recognition.
I sat down and James smiled at me. I could see he had been crying. I kissed Hughie’s forehead and felt bad about finding it rather repulsive, because it was so thin and greasy.
“They say he might be able to come out tomorrow,” said James. “They’ve monitored everything and if his various levels get back to normal, which they should do, then he’ll come home. For a while, at least.”
James and I sat there quietly for about ten minutes, on either side of Hughie, neither of us knowing what on earth to say. There was no sound but the rumbling of hospital bustle in the background, and the relentless beeping of the heart monitor behind Hughie. Then I said to James: “Do you want to get some coffee? I’ll stay, if you like.”
James got up and I was left with Hughie alone, staring at the shell of the man, holding his hand and trying to imagine what it might be like without him.
Suddenly Hughie tried to speak. He made grunting noises. I put my head to his mouth. “Getting rather past my sell-by date, I’m afraid,” he said, hoarsely. Then he gave a kind of gasping laugh and closed his eyes.
April 23
Just got back from babysitting Gene. He has a bouncing machine that hangs from the doorframe, and he spends about ten minutes in it at a time, leaping up and down laughing, looking like a mixture of a leprechaun and Michael Flatley.
He can now put a blanket over his head and take it off. Which I think is tremendously clever.
He has a little cloth book of animals and we go through it again and again, me making all the animal noises. The only one he can do is the fish noise which is a kind of “pu pu” sound made simply from opening and closing your mouth. I am overjoyed. I feel totally responsible for having taught Gene to read. I am bowled over by his brilliance.
Later
James rang and said Hughie was much better and back at home. But it’s only a matter of time. James said it was probably weeks rather than days but might even be days. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.
May 5
When I went round to Gene yesterday, I found that there was no sign of his special book, so he couldn’t go “pu pu” at the fish. I drew a fish for him, but it unfortunately elicited no response, just a pointed finger and a “Bah!” When she got back from shopping, Chrissie said they’d lost the book. I went home cast in gloom and spent the whole of this morning going round children’s bookshops trying to get another copy, but needless to say none of them had heard of it.
Finally I went down to Daisy and Tom’s in the King’s Road, but the only cloth books they had were all done up in cellophane, so you couldn’t see inside, and there was nothing, as far as I could see, with a fish in it. Only dozens of black-and-white books.
“Why black-and-white?” I asked an assistant, and she told me
that according to the latest research, babies respond to black and white better than color.
Sounds bonkers. Suppose it’s publishers’ way of saving money—babies, after all, can’t shout: “We want color!”
Felt very gloomy on my way out, but as I passed the crayon section, what should I see but the book! Admittedly packed in a set of four, for £10, but a grannie’s love knows no bounds. I was so delighted by this that I had to find the saleswoman I’d spoken to, and show her.
“When he gets to the fish bit,” I said, expecting her to faint with admiration and call her colleagues over, asking me to repeat this amazing story, “he goes ‘pu pu’!”
“Oh, really?” she said, edging away slightly.
Found my car clamped when I got out so book in total has cost me approximately £280. Worth every penny, I say.
May 7
Penny rang me in a panic. She sounded tearful and desperate. “I’ve got VD,” she said. “That wretched man has given me VD! Can you credit it! I’ve only just got over the cystitis and I’m bleeding!”
“But you can’t have VD,” I said sensibly. “He must have used a condom anyway. Everyone under the age of forty-five uses a condom these days. It’s compulsory. Anyway, they don’t call it VD these days. It’s a genito-urinary infection. At least it was when I last…”
“Well, I’ve got it anyway,” she said. “I’ve probably got AIDS, if he’s gay. Oh, God. Just when I thought I might be going to be a grannie! You can’t be a grannie with AIDS! I mean it’s totally out of order!”
“Shape up, Pens!” I said. “It’s incredibly difficult to catch AIDS. Or rather,” I added, to show that I knew what I was talking about, “to contract the HIV virus, which leads to AIDS.”
No! I Don't Want to Join a Book Club: Diary of a Sixtieth Year Page 21