No! I Don't Want to Join a Book Club: Diary of a Sixtieth Year (27 page)

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.

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!”