Once, she told me, he came back from a skiing holiday with friends and their daughter Jane innocently announced that Patsy had managed to leave a burn mark, from a candle, on a cupboard. ‘He went berserk!’ said Patsy. ‘I thought: hang on, you’ve had two weeks skiing and I’ve been looking after our house, our child. Then he gave me a key ring with a little ski boot hanging on it. I remember throwing it at him and saying: boots! I’ll have a skiing holiday! There were so many incidents like that. You’ve already got the idea, haven’t you,’ she said, ‘of why I’m happy to be single!’
Well, yes, I have, but it isn’t just that. Patsy is always, always, the life and soul of a social gathering. Both men and women are drawn to her. I have seen the way people look at her, as if a crumb from her table is magic dust to be grasped and safely stowed away. Patsy loves the theatre like no one I have met. She hoovers up books. She has masses of friends. She has her daughter. She has her voluntary work. She has her grandchildren. But most of all, she likes being on her own.
A year after I left The Independent, she told me that her great love’s wife had died and he was now trying to woo Patsy back. She had had an affair with him for years. ‘With him,’ she said, ‘it was just the nice things. We didn’t talk about the mortgage. We didn’t talk about the children. The first time we met in a hotel, he put the key on the table. When I got upstairs, he had this little suitcase with champagne, two glasses. It was all fun.’ The affair ended more than fifteen years ago and there had, said Patsy, been nothing but the ‘odd fling’ since. And now the love of her life was begging her to come back.
Her friends ‘egged her on’. Her daughter was keen. Patsy agonized. I knew she would say no. You freaked out, I told her. You didn’t want to be with him. We were sitting here, at this very table, and I knew you didn’t really want to be with him. ‘I went home,’ said Patsy, ‘and he rang up and wanted to talk. I was just about to sit down and watch Match of the Day!’ So, I said, like a judge announcing a verdict, you didn’t want it. ‘No!’ said Patsy. ‘I’m a mean old selfish person!’ No, I said, you’re not, but you value your independence. All that stuff you built up for yourself, your career. You were an inspirational teacher. You’ve had this amazing social life. ‘Don’t exaggerate!’ said Patsy. It’s true, I told her. You’ve had this incredibly rich, full life. And the truth is, you’re a profoundly unconventional person and you didn’t want to shack up with some bloke whose dinner you didn’t want to cook.
Patsy gave an exasperated smile, but it was like a concession of defeat. ‘I’ve had comments,’ she said, ‘like one couple who came to live with me briefly because they were between houses. The wife said, “I wish Patsy had somebody there. I wish she could get together with Tim,” and her husband said, “Oh no, I don’t think she’d be interested in security.” He said, “She doesn’t want anyone, because if she did, she would.” I think,’ she added, ‘there’s definitely a signal you put out. Daniel used to say, “You don’t realize how difficult you are to approach.”’ I sighed. I’ve lost count of the number of people who have said that to me. That ‘ice maiden’ business among the backstage staff at the Southbank Centre was, I’ve gathered over the years, just the tip of a giant iceberg of male resentment about me being too cool, too independent or just too damn fierce. It is, I told Patsy, about being too self-contained, isn’t it? ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s also somehow not wanting anything. Because you don’t!’
‘The other thing I’ve thought,’ she said, ‘is when you see people and you hear what they’re saying and you just think “oh God, I’d hate to be in that situation”. There’s someone I sometimes do some work with and she said to me recently, “I’d really love to have your life.” I said, “What do you mean?” She said, “Well, you have such a lovely life.” I said, “Well, it’s not fun all the time,” thinking what can I say that’s not fun? And then I said, “Are you all right?” She said, “Yes, I’m all right, but I just don’t have your exuberance.” I was trying,’ Patsy said with a sheepish smile, ‘not to be exuberant.’
When I was asked to host a salon, by a lovely woman who runs a ‘knowledge networking business’, I was thrilled. I didn’t have to organize it. I didn’t have to cook the food. All I had to do was slap on a bit of make-up and turn up.
If it wasn’t exactly Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Round Table, it was still a lot of fun. We talked about books. We talked about banks. We talked about business and art. We talked about big issues, like unemployment and debt in the Western world, and small issues, like the rise of the twirly moustache. What we didn’t talk about was our jobs. We didn’t talk about our children, or where they went to school. We didn’t talk about being happily married, or unhappily married, or happily single, or miserably alone. We didn’t have to bother with any of this. We could, for just one evening, forget about the details of our lives, and think about ideas, and the world.
I looked up the history of the salon before I went out, and was pleased to see that one of the key women to have hosted salons was Queen Christina, after she abdicated from the Swedish throne and went to live in Rome. I felt a ridiculous surge of pride because my Twitter name is @queenchristina_, I’m half Swedish and was born in Rome. I was interested to read that Christina felt ‘an insurmountable distaste for marriage’ and ‘an insurmountable distaste for all the things that females talked about’. I wouldn’t go quite as far as that, but I would certainly rather talk about politics than fashion or shoes. And I would rather talk about current affairs than other people’s families. It’s one of the reasons I like parties. At a party, you’re more likely to talk to someone you’ve just met about what’s going on in the world than whether their little Amelia or Jack got into the school of their choice.
I have always been to parties on my own. It was only when I went to a garden party at Buckingham Palace, and saw eight thousand people, all in couples, that I thought perhaps it might have been a good idea to bring a guest. The only people I recognized were Cherie Blair and the Queen. They didn’t, for quite good reasons, recognize me. So I marched up to a woman who looked friendly. She turned out to be the ‘networking queen’, Carole Stone. We had a lively conversation and she has since invited me to some of her parties. I think this kind of thing happens much more when you go to parties on your own.
It’s the same with travel. If you travel on your own, you usually end up meeting nice people and having interesting conversations. You do, of course, spend a fair bit of time not talking to anyone, but who wants to talk all the time? There’s the whole of world literature to get through! There’s the whole of history and the whole of world news! And we all need time to stop, and muse, and dream.
Having a good life as a single person does involve more effort. If you want to see someone, you have to make an arrangement. Most single people I know make much more social effort than the people I know in couples. They also have a much richer social life. They go out more. They have more adventures and do more interesting things. When you see single people out at restaurants with their friends, they’re usually having animated conversations. They’re not the ones staring at their iPhones and looking – well, let’s just say it, bored.
In the months after I lost my job, I met an awful lot of people to ask advice, for coffee, for lunch, for drinks. Quite a few of them were people I hardly knew. About half of them were men. After years of having more women friends than men, I’ve learnt that I really like the company of men. Over dinner one night, one of these men asked me how it was all going. I sighed and then told him about some of the articles I was researching, some of the books I had been reviewing and a couple of talks I had given. This man has a very big, very well-paid job. He is happily married, with a son he adores. He topped up my glass and then said something that shocked me. ‘It sounds,’ he said, ‘pretty enviable.’
Our culture has not been kind to single women. In literature, we are portrayed as shrews and battleaxes and colourful eccentrics and tweedy detectives, or pretty young women
just waiting to be picked and saved. We have a shelf life. There comes a moment when we have lost our ‘bloom’. One minute we are ripe for the picking. The next, we’re a Miss Bates or a Miss Havisham, struggling on with our tiny lives and rarely mentioned without the word ‘pity’ or ‘poor’.
When Bridget Jones hit the bookshelves, and then the big screen, there was a big sigh of collective relief as youngish, brightish, normal-looking single women finally saw a version of themselves that didn’t actually make them wince. You didn’t have to knock back quite so much Chardonnay to be pleased that someone else was talking about the challenges of Christmas in your childhood bed.
Sex and the City followed. A world of bad dates, dry manhattans and very expensive shoes. If we couldn’t quite match the lifestyle, some of us could match the bad dates, though I’m pleased to say that I have never yet been asked to pee on a man in bed. Sex was at the heart of it. These beautiful, brassy, bracingly frank women had big hopes for big homes and big lives, with plenty of money and plenty of sex. All very glitzy. All very entertaining. But this is not how most women live.
When Anita Brookner died, I looked again at some of her novels. The women in them could not be less like the Sex and the City girls. They are polite and self-disciplined and shy. They are not fiercely independent – they are not fiercely anything – but they work hard and do their jobs well. Like their creator, they have a clear-eyed view of the world. They would like to believe that the meek will inherit the earth, and that the mousy get swept off their feet by handsome Mr Rochesters, but they know that it’s the bold and brassy who usually win.
I first read Hotel du Lac when I was twenty and thought it was a portrait of a miserable life. Dowdy middle-aged woman goes on holiday by a lake and faces up to a future without love. Why not, I thought, just go the whole hog and get a noose? Thirty-odd years on, it felt like a different book. Edith, the romantic novelist at the heart of it, has run away from her wedding, at thirty-nine, to a dull man she thought might be her last chance. Sent by her friends, in disgrace, on a solitary holiday at the Hotel du Lac, she meets another dull man who offers to marry her and give her the social position he thinks she needs. He doesn’t love her. She doesn’t love him.
‘I do not sigh and yearn’, she says, ‘for extravagant displays of passion.’ What she wants is something much more modest. ‘What I crave’, she says, ‘is the simplicity of routine. An evening walk, arm in arm, in fine weather. A game of cards.’ But you can’t do this, she decides, with someone you don’t love. And so she turns him down.
Anita Brookner’s heroines are single not because they are too dowdy, but because they are too honest. They know that life is full of compromise, but they still see a compromise too far. They have learnt to live with quiet courage because of the choices they have made.
People don’t talk all that much about quiet courage. They don’t think that navigating the world on your own needs courage. They also don’t understand that creating art, or writing books, or even carving out a decent career, takes time that many women who are wives and mothers don’t have. Emily Dickinson knew this. Jane Austen knew this. Virginia Woolf knew this, and wrote about a woman’s need to have ‘a room of one’s own’. Anita Brookner knew this. Starting at fifty-three, she wrote twenty-four glittering, uncomfortably truthful novels that gave voice to the unassuming, the modest and the quiet. And let’s also not forget the quiet, shy, modest, single men.
Anita Brookner knew what we all learn: that life is a balance between freedom and security. Security is – well, safe. Freedom is frightening, but sometimes more fun. You can be lonely in a relationship and happy on your own. I think almost anyone can have a relationship if they really want one, but you have to be prepared to make the compromises, and put in the work.
When that fireman called me ‘Miss’, I almost laughed. I nearly said that yes, I was single and probably twice his age, and this was why I had ended up, after a dinner the night before, at a members’ club at 2 a.m., having a fascinating conversation with a publisher, a journalist and a man who used to work with the Prince of Wales. I had a wild urge to quote Keats, who told his brother George that he didn’t want to marry, because he didn’t want to limit his life. ‘I feel more and more every day . . .’ he wrote, ‘that I do not live in this world alone but in a thousand worlds.’ Well, I’ll raise a giant glass to that.
Shooting the breeze
When I turned up at the London Eye, I saw a few men clutching gifts. Gradually, the group grew. Then my friend Nick arrived, led by his partner, Ivan, and wearing a blindfold. It was Nick’s birthday, and Ivan wanted to give him a nice surprise.
Nick’s face, when he took the blindfold off, certainly showed surprise. Who wouldn’t be surprised to think they were being taken off for a birthday meal and find themselves about to drink champagne with twenty-five friends in a glass capsule 400 feet above the River Thames? And then put in a cab home to find that their partner has filled their flat with food and drink for a party?
I have known Nick for fifteen years, since we both moved into the same converted school. He loves having parties. When he lived upstairs, he and his then partner, Stefano, used to have musical soirees as well as parties, where people would play the piano or sing. Stefano is still upstairs and he loves having parties, too. We all love having parties. We all love bringing together our friends.
You don’t have to have parties to have friends. If you want to have friends, you just need to know how to be a friend because being a friend is an art.
I learnt it at my mother’s knee. Like her fellow countrywoman Greta Garbo, my mother sometimes mutters that she just ‘wants to be alone’. This is not true. She is very happy in her own company, which is just as well since she is now on her own, but she has more friends than anyone I have ever met. She has good friends because she is good company. She is cheerful, and curious, and polite. She knows that the art of conversation is based on listening and asking questions. People sometimes say to me ‘you can tell you’re a journalist because you ask so many questions’. I tell them that it’s nothing to do with being a journalist. It’s because I was brought up to be polite.
Sometimes, I’m not polite. In all my years of internet dating, for example, I would sometimes say to the man sitting across the table, ‘Would you like to ask me a question now?’ Usually, I would go home exhausted, thinking that I could now write a PhD on the person I’d just met, and wondering whether they had learnt a single fact about me. The next day, I would often get a text or email saying they’d had a lovely time and would love to meet again. I sometimes felt like sending them an invoice, for therapeutic services. A man with no curiosity is not a man I want to share my bed.
I was lucky where I grew up. As I’ve explained, it was on an estate where we children were practically shooed out of the front door and left to roam. From the age of eighteen months I was best friends with my next-door neighbour but one, Monique. She and her brothers had been born in Barbados. My sister was born in Bangkok. My brother and I were born in Rome. I was shocked to discover that babies could be born in England, too.
Monique and I were nurses, cowboys, maids and queens. At Christmas, we were Mary and Joseph. At Halloween, we were witches, casting spells in the Wendy house and drinking Cherryade blood. We did magic shows in the garden. We did plays, inviting all the neighbours and acting all the parts. We played a game called ‘Mary and Marion’. For this, you had to make a pile of chairs in the garden and cover the pile with blankets. Once you were inside, you could travel to the magic world in the sky. When our mothers called us in for beef burgers or Findus pancakes, we had to yell ‘there’s a storm coming, there’s a storm coming!’ and whip off the blankets, but without knocking the chairs down. Why? Goodness only knows why, but after all these years we are still in touch.
I once, by the way, chaired a panel with a writer who told me he spent quite a lot of his childhood washing grass. He and his friend picked the blades by hand, dipped them in soapy suds, rin
sed them and then hung them on the washing line to dry. Another writer, a poet, told me that he jumped off a climbing frame, convinced that he could fly. He fractured both his ankles when he found out he could not.
Friends are the people you laugh with, weep with, play with, wash grass with. Friends are the people who pick you up when you leap off a climbing frame and it doesn’t go quite as you planned. When I fell off the wall Monique and I regarded, for a while, as our ‘camp’, it was Monique who ran for help. We had fixed a broomstick in the ground to help us climb up on the wall. Unfortunately, I half landed on it, and in an unfortunate place. Luckily, Monique’s mother was a nurse. She made me do a shoulder stand without my pants as she inspected the rip. I had stitches and was in hospital for several days, but am still grateful that I just managed to avoid losing my virginity to a stick.
*
When I lost my job, my friends should have won awards. At first, I couldn’t speak to them. This is my pattern when something goes badly wrong. When I first discovered I had cancer, I told them by text and then didn’t answer the phone. When I was told that I would need a mastectomy, chemotherapy, radiotherapy and drugs that would, at thirty-nine, make me fat and menopausal as well as bald, it was the same. My friends were mostly happily coupled up, with young families. What the fuck did they know about going through this carnival parade of horrors alone?
In fact, I managed to avoid some of the horrors. I found a surgeon who helped me avoid the mastectomy, refused chemotherapy (after looking at a graph) and found that the drugs I had to take for five years afterwards didn’t make me fat or menopausal at all. My friends were wonderful, as they always are. Or perhaps I should say that nearly all my friends were wonderful. One had just met a dreadful man. She took me into hospital for my first operation and then seemed to melt into the air. For my fortieth birthday, and to thank my friends for their support, I had drinks at the Savoy. That friend didn’t turn up. She forgot to send a card. I had been on holidays with her for ten years. We had shared the deepest secrets in our hearts. She is, of course, not a friend now.
The Art of Not Falling Apart Page 21
