The other day Penny said to me, when I’d said I couldn’t care less, ‘But Marie! How can you bear to think that there might be no more rhinoceroses! Think about it! They’re such noble beasts!’
I did think, for three seconds, but to be perfectly frank if there weren’t any more rhinoceroses it wouldn’t make a hell of a lot of difference to my life. After all, there used to be all these dinosaurs milling about and yet these days we seem to be able to cope without pterodactyls, not to mention dodos, perfectly well. Of course if dinosaurs – or ‘dinos’ as I gather they’re affectionately known these days – hadn’t been there in the first place, Gene would have been deprived of a lot of enjoyment since, for some reason, young children seem to learn about nothing these days at school except the lives of Tyrannosaurus rexes and diplodocuses. But if a Tyrannosaurus rex were suddenly to arrive in Shepherd’s Bush I bet old Penny wouldn’t be terribly delighted when it started ripping up all the trees in her back garden. Not to mention sizing her up for breakfast. We wouldn’t hear much banging on about ‘beautiful beasts’ in that scenario, I fancy.
Of course, in the past few years, I haven’t needed the Rant to jolt me awake because three mornings a week I’ve woken up beside Archie – he’s either been here or I’ve been down there. I’ve always preferred going down to him, really, because despite the freezing cold, Mrs Evans, his housekeeper, has always cooked and frozen delicious meals for at least one night. Then there are the roaring fires, the open countryside outside, the lovely library with the musty smell of books, the reassuring presence of Hardy and, best of all, dear Archie himself.
Until recently he’d always spent the days striding about looking at dead trees or broken gates or reading or checking things out on the computer, and then every evening we’d settle down after supper and snuggle up together on the sofa, and either watch an old movie I’d brought down, or just chatter about nothing in particular.
‘Do you think it would have been as nice as this if we’d got together before I met David or you’d met Philippa?’ I’d said rather sentimentally one evening. I looked at his dear old weathered face, and smiled as he gave me a regretful shake of the head.
‘You’d have been angelic,’ he said. ‘Of course. But I … I was so immature! I remember having so many rows with Philippa during the first years of our marriage, and it wasn’t till much later that everything settled down. I don’t think you and I would have lasted for a second. It seems strange to say that, doesn’t it,’ he added, reaching out his hand to stroke my hair, ‘when now we fit together like a couple of old bedroom slippers?’
‘Excuse me!’ I said. ‘Bedroom slippers! I can think of a nicer simile than that!’
‘Like what?’ he said.
But I couldn’t think of anything. ‘I think the reverse is the case,’ I said. ‘I was so neurotic when I was young, so emotional, always taking offence. I’m bad enough now, but then! And you’ve always seemed so level-headed. I think I’d have driven you nuts. I agree, it’s best now. But it’s a shame not to have a history together.’
‘Depends what sort of history,’ Archie had replied, pulling me gently over to his side of the sofa. ‘As far as I’m concerned, I like it just as it is now, darling.’
‘So do I,’ I said. And with that, we had a brief affectionate cuddle, then gathered up our bits and pieces, put a guard in front of the dying fire, turned off the lights, shut Hardy into the kitchen, and wandered up to bed, me snuggling up to Archie to keep warm and him tucking me in at the sides, with his free arm, as if I were a child.
‘I love you,’ he said.
‘And I love you,’ I said. ‘And now is all that matters.’
Now was all that mattered then. But now, oh so sadly, it doesn’t seem to be like that any more.
4 February
Since my great friend Hughie died, James and I have become very close. ‘I’m your walker, darling,’ he says. ‘Don’t say that,’ I reply. ‘It makes me sound like a dog.’ But it’s true. Whenever I need a spare man, he’s always around, and whenever I need to go up a ladder, he’s always there to steady it. (‘One thing you must promise me, Mum,’ Jack said, after he’d found that I’d not only put up but also taken down all the Christmas decorations on my own. On a ladder. ‘Yes?’ I’d said, imagining he was going to ask me some enormous favour, like a guarantee that I’d never get married again, or insist I make a will leaving everything to him. ‘Now you’re sixty-five, will you please never go up a ladder without someone holding it at the bottom?’)
I was rather touched by this request, and of course since making the promise I never have – gone up a ladder, that is. And golly, am I glad! Half my contemporaries either are, or have been, in hospital having fallen off a ladder. It’s weird. The moment they hit their sixty-fifth birthday they get a craving to scramble up a ladder, and then they invariably drop off at the top. In the past month alone two of my friends have clambered up ladders and, literally, the moment they’ve got to the top rung they’ve swayed slightly and then fallen to the bottom. Just like that. No reason. Perhaps it was the thin air up there.
Anyway, James said he’d come for coffee to get cracking on putting Skype in for me, and I settled down to read the Rant before he arrived. I’d barely read the headline (‘DUNCE NATION! Eighty per cent of adults can’t find Britain on a map’), when the bell rang and it was James. Early.
‘Now before we start on the Skype, I want to ask a favour of you,’ he said, as I put the kettle on. ‘You know I’ve been doing these art classes recently …’
He started to tell me about them as we went into the sitting room, and I sat down and put my feet back up again.
He has to do something now Hughie’s died, he said, and has no one to look after – so he’s taken up art. I made polite noises because it’s always a bit tricky, having taught art at a school until I retired, when some complete amateur says they’ve started to paint. I mean it’s very touching and all that, but they seem to think they can just pick up a brush or a pencil and draw and hey presto! They think they’re Leonardo da Vinci. The truth is that you really have to spend years practising day after day before you can even begin to get the hang of drawing or watercolours, a notoriously difficult medium, so I always wince when retired contemporaries say that they’ve ‘become an artist’ in their old age. I mean it’s just not possible. It’s tricky when they show me their pictures. I’m just so bad at lying. Funny, I would never say, at my age, that I’d decided to ‘become a pianist.’ Particularly not to someone who’d been a piano teacher all her life. I mean I might be able to thump my way through a Chopin prelude rather badly, but it’s highly unlikely I’d get much further.
But back to James. ‘I’ve decided to do some portraits, darling,’ he said.
I’d had an awful premonition that was coming and I tried not to look as if I’d just opened an envelope with a gifted goat inside. I tried to change the subject.
‘Funny you should say that,’ I said. ‘I’ve decided to get back to painting myself, this year. I was thinking of trying landscapes. You know I’ve always been keen on them …’
But my efforts failed.
‘And I wondered if I could use you as a model?’ said James, as if he hadn’t heard. ‘I’d love to, well, interpret your spirit.’
‘What exactly do you mean, “interpret my spirit”?’ I asked, suspiciously. ‘I hope I’d still look like me.’
I’m clearly an old fuddy-duddy. I do prefer representations of things to look like what they’re meant to represent, and I was nervous of what the ‘spirit’ of me might conjure up in James’s mind. But I could hardly say no to a useful Skype-installer and ladder-holder.
‘I’ll tell you when I’ve thought it through,’ he said guardedly.
Unfortunately, when he looked at my computer he found the broadband wasn’t working for some reason, so he couldn’t download it. We had to call it a day for the moment.
‘By the way,’ he added, before he left, ‘we must see Bitte
r Quinces, Poisoned Souls. It’s that new Swedish film and everyone says it’s brilliant. It’s got five stars everywhere!’
6 February
Spent a couple of very jolly hours pulling out old canvases and sorting out paints and brushes, and even managed to dust off a portable easel I sometimes used to take with me when I went down to Archie’s. I must say some of the pictures I did in the past weren’t half bad, though I say it myself. Feel I’ve probably got a bit rusty, but it all made me very enthusiastic, and I can’t wait to get started again.
I was just about to load the dishwasher this morning – my special way, with the knives all facing downwards – when blow me, as I stomped into the kitchen there was one of those beetles that the Rant had warned were on the brink of extinction! At least I was almost sure it was. It was quite big and black and shiny, in two parts, with long waggling antennae. It was pretty swift too. On seeing me it raced to the other side of the room and tried to hide in the crack between the floor and the skirting board.
Of course the thrill of finding one in my kitchen made me reconsider my feelings about this particular endangered species. So I immediately turned into an eco-warrior. I placed a tumbler over the beetle, slipped a postcard under it, picked it up, walked with it reverently to the garden, opened the door, bent down and sent it off with a soothing benediction: ‘God speed, little fellow. May you prosper, and may your children prosper and your children’s children …’ It was horribly cold out there, though, so I hope he doesn’t die.
I even left a note for Michelle. ‘If you see a beetle in the kitchen please don’t kill it. It is an ENDANGERED SPECIES’ I wrote on a little pink Post-it note. ‘Espèce en danger’, I added, hoping that made sense, ‘mais pas dangereuse.’
‘Are you sure, actually, zat eet ees special beetle?’ said Michelle, when I found her in the kitchen this afternoon, mixing a revolting muesli dish with yogurt and drinking some kind of bio thing called Yakult. Funny name. ‘I ’ave see one like zees last week, and I try to keel heem but he runs by frigidaire. ’E is like bad beetle we ’ave in France, actually, ’ow you say, a concrelat.’
‘Oh, I’m sure you have them in France,’ I said, knowledgeably. ‘Lots of them. But France is much richer in wildlife than England. Here we must preserve them. No, here we are lucky to have black beetles in our kitchens. Particularly endangered species.’
She looked doubtful. ‘Perhaps you’re thinking of a cockroach?’ I said, the penny dropping. ‘Because it’s not a cockroach,’ I added with certainty. I’d seen plenty of them in every lavatory I entered in Morocco when I went on a wild trip with Marion just after we’d both left school. ‘Cockroaches are brown.’
I remember once going to a loo in Tangiers and counting twenty-nine of the beastly things inside, all grinning at me and waving their antennae about.
I might put a saucer of milk out for it if comes back tonight, and perhaps some crisps, but I am not sure what endangered species like to eat so have decided against the crisps.
Shut the kitchen door in case Pouncer takes a fancy to the scuttling beast. Even though he’s old in years, he can’t resist anything scampering about on the floor.
8 February
I know it’s only a few weeks since I made the List of Things to Do, but I don’t feel I’ve got to grips with it yet. Time is speeding by. Honestly, within what will seem like only a few weeks, it’ll be Christmas yet again. How on earth does one fill one’s days? I’m at a loss to know. Before I’ve blinked, another week has raced by.
I suppose everything takes a bit longer these days, but not that long, surely? My days seem to be spent doing maintenance. Maintenance, maintenance, maintenance. Sometimes it’s me who needs maintaining – a round of doctors to see about this and that, a strange patch of eczema at the back of my knee, blood tests, visiting the optician for new glasses … then there are the exercises we all have to do these days to stop our limbs seizing up like one of those clockwork drummers. You know the sort. They work perfectly well and then suddenly one day they just stick, frozen, as they beat – or rather don’t beat – their drum. And however much you wind them to the ultimate point or tap them firmly on the side of the table, they just refuse to move and sit there, mid-beat. I’m starting to feel like that in the mornings. I wish I could have a change of oil, like a car, to get everything lubricated again.
The other day Gene said to me, ‘Granny, do you go up the stairs slowly because you like it?’
Apparently it’s all down to the little pads between one’s joints wearing out, or shrivelling up – I imagine them like those old India rubbers you find at the back of drawers. All firm and bouncy when you originally put them away, but, when discovered years later, dry and cracked and unmalleable.
Not only that but there’s also all the checking up on one’s friends. Whenever anyone says they’ve got to have a scan or an X-ray or an appointment to see an oncologist, I rush to the diary and put in the date, to remind me to ring them up within hours to find out exactly how they got on.
And apart from all that there’s the maintenance of wherever one lives. In my case, it’s a hundred-year-old house. If it’s not a slate off the roof, it’s a drip on the upstairs tap, or the front door suddenly sticks because it’s swollen by the rain. If it’s not the draughts, it’s the blistering paintwork, and if it’s not the little holes in the shower-head getting bunged up with limescale, it’s the lino that starts buckling in the kitchen – signifying that there might well be a leak from the dishwasher.
How people with jobs manage to cope I just don’t know. Indeed, how I used to cope when I worked full-time as a teacher, I don’t know either. Sometimes entire days are simply taken up with fixing, collecting, repairing, buying replacements – well, just maintaining. And when you go to bed at night, you feel you’ve achieved nothing because all you’ve done is rush around like a mad thing, just to stay in exactly the same place as you were before.
12 February
I was over at Jack and Chrissie’s yesterday, picking up Gene from school and looking after him until Chrissie got back from some essential shopping before they fly off – and when she got back she made me a cup of tea. She was pink with the cold. Golly February’s a cruel month. I took the chance to reapply my make-up – I always like to look my best, but particularly when immaculate old Chrissie’s about – and as I was doing so, my lipstick rolled off my lap onto the floor. Chrissie said to Gene, ‘Pick that up for Granny! Don’t make her bend down!’ and I had a completely different vision of myself as I must appear to Chrissie – rather less agile than I actually feel.
And then Jack came back from work and they started discussing a trip they’d made to the Monument. Jack said, ‘You must go, Mum, it’s really interesting! It’s where the Great Fire of London started,’ and Gene said, ‘Yes and you go up all these steps to the top!’ and Chrissie said, ‘You can see all over London!’ and then Jack turned to Chrissie and said, ‘Might be a bit much for Mum, don’t you think?’ and then added, ‘all those steps,’ which I thought was pretty odd and then I heard Chrissie saying, ‘Oh no, I’m sure she could manage them!’
Manage them! I’m sure no one said that about me when I was fifty!
Of course it’s these little incidents I’ll miss when they’re in New York. Just the small encounters and closeness and estrangements and instincts and understandings that make relationships. How on earth am I going to cope without them?
It’s not as if I even have Archie to keep me company, now, really. He’s just a little bit too peculiar. Tomorrow Im off to see him, and I have to admit I’m rather dreading it.
16 February
Just back from seeing Archie. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. I don’t know what to do. I’m so worried about him. The first thing that made me nervous, as I turned the car into the drive, was to find him sitting on one of the stone lions that guards his front door, in his pyjamas. He hadn’t shaved and his hair was sticking up on end. As it was midday and raining it was particularly odd. A
nd then he greeted me as if I’d been there all the time – there was no surprise or pleasure in his seeing me.
I parked the car, got out quickly and went up to him. ‘Darling,’ I said, putting my arms round him and kissing him. ‘How are you?’
‘I’ve lost my key,’ he said. ‘I went out this morning to find Philippa in the garden and now I can’t get back inside. I’ve been looking everywhere.’
‘But Philippa’s dead, sweetie!’ I said.
‘I know she’s dead, Marie,’ said Archie, looking at me as if I were mad. ‘For God’s sake, what are you talking about?’
‘But you said you’d gone out to look for her.’
‘I didn’t. ‘I said I’d come out to look for Hardy, my dog, in case you’d forgotten …’
‘But you said Philippa.’
‘I didn’t!’ he said. ‘Honestly, Marie, are you going deaf?’
I said nothing. Then, ‘But what about the key?’ I asked. ‘Have you lost the key? Have you locked yourself out?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And I know there’s a place where it’s hidden somewhere but I can’t remember where it is.’
‘It’s under the fourth flower pot outside the back door,’ I said, leading him round the house. We found the key, then went back to the front of the house and opened the door. It was still drizzling. ‘Now come on, go and have a hot shower and get yourself dressed. You must be freezing. It’s nearly lunchtime.’
No! I Don’t Need Reading Glasses! Page 4
