No! I Don't Want to Join a Book Club: Diary of a Sixtieth Year (22 page)

“I don’t think he’s in denial,” I said honestly. “I think it’s us who are in denial.” I kindly said “us” though quite honestly it was really James I was talking about. “I think Hughie has got the hang of death. You live, you die and it’s all fine, that’s Hughie’s line.”

“I think he’s living in his head,” said James.

“No bad place to live,” I said. “Head, heart…whatever…But you’re the one I’m worrying about. Perhaps,” I added, struck by inspiration, “you’re doing his worrying for him. You’re sparing him all the pain and suffering by going through it yourself.”

That’s one good thing about having done all this crap therapy. You can spout out any number of psychological models to people which sometimes give them a kind of comfort. Though actually that particular bit of wisdom was from the philosopher Viktor Frankl.

James gulped down this shred of comfort, and I could see, as his face slowly relaxed, that it made him feel better. We all believe that if what we suffer is something noble, something to spare others, we can bear it. If it’s just our own measly suffering and holds no greater good, it’s simply wall-to-wall grisly.

“That helps,” he said. “Now we’ve just got to wait for the results.”

December 2

Ever since that conversation with Hughie in the garden, I’ve been wondering about sex. I last had sex five years ago, and frankly, apart from the odd unsuitable flare-up of sexual feelings (Hughie [twice], Lucy’s dad, curiously, but only once, and, oddly, the eighteen-year-old son of one of my friends who talked to me for hours at a party; couldn’t have been more inappropriate) I haven’t fancied anyone in the meantime.

So what, I ask myself, is the point of having a tiny bedroom taken up almost entirely with a double bed? After all, the last thing I want is a bloke.

Anyway, to get back to the point. Wondering about sex. I’m seriously considering not having it anymore. Penny gave me a book that she said would get me back in the mood. It was called
Better Than Ever
by a Dr. Bernie Zilbergeld and the come-on was: “New brooms may sweep cleaner…but old brooms know where the corners are!”

Yuck! The very idea of being fucked by an old broom is totally disgusting!

December 6th

Went to see Gene again today. Talk about better than sex. I may have no one to cuddle me, but Gene makes up for everything. His smell, his soft, new young skin, his little arms reaching round my neck…it sounds horribly vampirelike, but it is so, so seductive.

I love having this little boy near me. When we go out, even into the bitter cold and misery of Brixton, I love the feel of him against me. I love his coat against mine, all bulked up, and inside somewhere, his warm wrapped-up body. Underneath his outer shell, rumbling with cloth, underneath his dark blue coat and cardigan, his green trousers and little emerald tights, his T-shirt, his vest and nappy…in the middle he is like a hazelnut, all ripe and sweet.

I used to resent the time I had to spend with Jack when he was tiny…but now I don’t resent a minute with Gene. I can just sit for hours and hours, playing with him, watching him, picking him up, feeding him, putting him down. For me it’s not remotely boring. Or rather, as Lucy’s husband, Roger, said (about the only interesting thing Roger has ever said), it is a kind of “exquisite boredom.”

Is it something to do with boundaries? With Jack I was never quite certain where I ended and he began, we were all hopelessly muddled up. If he cried I was in pain, if he smiled I was happy. But with Gene, I know where both he and I begin and end. It makes the relationship so clear and pure.

It’s odd, but every minute I’m with him, I feel my own selfishness and cynicism is being rubbed away by this good and simple little chap.

Dec 7th

I was just about to go to bed when the bell rang. It was James. His face was ashen.

“I’m so sorry it’s so late, but can I come in?” he said.

“It’s Hughie, isn’t it,” I said. “You’ve had the results. Come on, darling, come in and have a drink. Where is Hughie, anyway?”

“He’s in such a bad temper,” said James, walking into the sitting room. He was half-crying, choking in the way that men do. “It’s much worse than we thought. He’s only got a few months to live, if that, and all he said when we got back from the hospital was: ‘Just months to live? Well, let’s crack open a bottle of champagne!’ and I said how could he
think
of opening a bottle of champagne at a time like this…” He slumped into a chair. “And he said for God’s sake, he was trying to make the best of things, and I’m afraid I got really angry and of course, darling, I was so upset, and Hughie finally said, really coldly, you know how cold he can be: ‘For fuck’s sake it’s
me
who’s got the fucking lung cancer, not you!’ and I slammed the door and here I am. Oh, I feel so awful. What will I do without him…?”

What will
I
do without him, I wondered, selfishly, as I downed a large double scotch in the kitchen before going back into the sitting room with the bottle of wine and buckets of soothing sympathy. It’s all very well this joking about death, but life would be very empty without Hughie. Or rather, the whole rabble of Hughies that make up Hughie. Will be very empty, I should say.

Eventually I packed James off and rang Hughie while he was on his way, and offered just as much sympathy as Hughie could bear (i.e., about a millionth of an ounce) and reminded him, totally unnecessarily, that James was just a poor mortal and full of kindness.

“I know,” said Hughie. “Thank God he went to see you. I just suddenly got angry, you know. I mean his reaction was just selfish. If I’ve only got a few months to live, I don’t want to live them with people weeping all around me. I might as well die tomorrow. What did James think was going to happen to me? He must have known this was going to happen. We all die, for God’s sake. I don’t have some special relationship with death. All the signs that we’re going to die have been there from the very day we were born. And as I’m older than James by about fifteen years, the chances were always that I’d die first.”

“Well, do be kind to James, won’t you,” I said. “He’s utterly devastated.”

“Oh, I’ll be kind to James, don’t worry,” said Hughie, rather sourly.

“And I have to say that I’m rather devastated, too, I’m afraid,” I added, rather nervously. “But I am at least making it an excuse to have a hundred drinks.”

“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.

1. Never wear white. It makes yellow teeth look yellower.
   
2. 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.
   
3. 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.
   
4. 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.
   
5. Never wear trousers after fifty, unless they are ludicrously well cut and slinky, and never wear short skirts.
   
6. Make sure you possess and wear the most glamorous dressing gown in the world.
   
7. Never wear trainers (especially stone-colored ones), or any kind of sports clothes, trackie bottoms, tops, etc.