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

by Virginia Ironside

  “Not a lot, no, why?” she said.

  “All my teeth seem to have great gaps between them, suddenly,” I said. “My mouth looks like castellation on a medieval turret.”

  “It’s because your gums have receded,” said Penny. “They do when you get older, you know.”

  “Oh, God. The trouble is that when I floss my teeth, not only can I feel all my fillings wiggling about, but my gums start to bleed. You don’t know a good dentist, do you?”

  “Well,” said Penny, rummaging around in her bag for a phone number. “It just so happens, that I do. This is one I went to last week…”

  Out of her bag fluttered a couple of photographs. I picked one up. It was of a man in full leathers standing by an enormous motor-bike. “Friend of yours?” I asked jokily as I handed it back.

  “Oh, er, no,” said Penny, clearly embarrassed as she stuffed it back into her bag. “No one. Lovely evening. Must dash.”

  Later

  Thinking things over, I wondered about that photograph. Penny’s illegitimate son? But she hasn’t got one, as far as I know. Her only child is Lisa, a wayward daughter of thirty-five who lives on benefits, much to her mother’s despair, and whose biological clock is ticking so loudly you can hear it from Herefordshire, where she lives.

  Then the penny dropped. It could only be one thing. A man from Dating Direct. Penny had told me she was thinking of logging on, but I never thought she’d actually get round to it. I rushed upstairs to my computer and scurried around the site, and very soon, to my amazement, found her. There was a picture of her that must have been taken before I ever knew her—it looked as if she were about fifteen—and beside it were written the words: “Fun-loving, intelligent, good figure, likes reading, walking and singing. Vegetarian though will eat fish. Looking for like-minded nonsmoker. Age: forty-eight.”

  Forty-eight! My jaw dropped. She’s only a tiny bit younger than me! But mustn’t say anything, as it would be too humiliating for her.

  I’ve never gone online for a man, but I have, on occasion, trawled through the small ads. The men sometimes sound OK in the written ads, and then it all turns to dust when you ring their box number and listen to their frightful voices.

  “Hello!” they say, reading off a script, which they have, it’s clear, been practicing at home. “I’m sixty-five years young and have a good sense of humor and still, I hope, a sense of adventure.” This is usually said with an artificial chuckle. “I hope I’m presentable—my female friends say that for a bloke with a bald head and a bit of a paunch, I’m very attractive! But that’ll be up to you to decide! I like going to the theater, walking, wining and dining. I love music and I go to the gym two or three times a week. I have two dogs—so if you don’t like animals you’re not the woman for me! I care deeply about the environment and my ideal day would be a morning walk, followed by a drink and a good meal in a country pub, followed by, perhaps, a good film or a discussion about a book we’ve both read. I know you’re out there! Why don’t you ‘go for it’ and contact me? Whatever you feel, I wish you all the luck in the world in finding that special person…”

  Of course while I listen, I’m sitting back in my little house puking and sneering over every word. Goes to the gym three times a week? Has he nothing better to do? As for discussing books, forget it. As far as I’m concerned there are only two phrases to describe books. One is: “Absolutely brilliant! You must read it!” or “Total crap. Don’t touch it with a bargepole.” And what exactly, might I ask, does the verb “to wine” mean? I know about “whining”; indeed, I’m an expert, but “wining”? “I wine, you wine, he wines, we wine, you wine, they wine?” Surely not. Does it mean to get pissed? Or does it mean ordering a glass of warm Chardonnay or Pinot Grigio at the Goat and Duck from a bottle that was opened last July?

  Oh dear, I’m such an old meanie. The awful thing is that these blokes often do sound rather sweet, in spite of their ghastly habits. But GSOH! OHAT (Good Sense of Humour. Own Hair and Teeth)! Preserve me!

  In fact I’m often amazed by my women friends who manage to make really good sexual relationships with men. For me, they (relationships) have always been fantastically complicated affairs, like trying to set the video recorder to record in advance, and invariably end in tears. I think men must join the long list of things that I am never going to manage to master, like the stock market, the history of China, the structure of the European Union and tap dancing. I am seriously thinking of giving them (men, that is) up for good.

  These thoughts were checked by my cat, Pouncer, winding his tail around my legs, so I carefully picked off all the remaining red mullet from the bones and gave it to him. He sniffed at it and then looked at me in an angry, hurt way, as if he’d been offered a dish of arsenic. Aren’t cats funny? Red mullet does cost £8 a pound, after all. Woops, I mean kilothings. There are some things I have decided I will never get the hang of, and kilothings is one of them.

  Nov 9th

  This morning I knocked on Michelle’s door to see if she was OK.

  “I am good,” she said, staring straight ahead of her. She was lying in bed in an orange bedjacket made, it seemed, entirely from feathers, and a pair of knickers, watching breakfast telly. I asked if she’d been looking for flats. “No, not a beet,” she said. “I like it here. You are like my muzair.”

  Her “muzair,” as far as I remember her when I last met her on the Champs-Elysees, is a gorgeous and seductively slim blonde who looks about nineteen, wears top to toe leather, and has a card that reads “Marie Fontaine: Lady of Leisure. Expertise: Shopping and Bopping!” in French, I don’t quite know what to make of it all.

  (I, on the other hand, am, natch, full of quiet dignity, groan with Protestant work ethic and rarely spend any money at all. I was born to scrimp and save, keep pieces of string, iron old wrapping paper for use a second time around and believe it or not, even keep my tights going by cutting off one half when one leg ladders, and wearing it with another single leg to get the most wear out of them. “You don’t!” said Penny, incredulously, when I told her. “I do!” I said. I may be a wild child of the sixties still with a penchant for gorgeous clothes from Whistles and agnès b., but I’m also a frugal war baby—an odd combination. We both are.)

  Hope Michelle will be able to cope with the house on her own while I’m away this weekend staying with my old friend Lucy.

  November 10th

  Got up at six and spent the whole morning putting yellow Post-Its everywhere as reminders for Michelle. “Have you double-locked?” is stuck to the front door. “Remember to feed Pouncer!!” is on the door to her room. A series of arrows along the floor leads to my sitting room, ending up by the window, with the instruction: “Shut the shutters at night!” on the final one. The cooker features a warning: “Turn all gas off before going out or going to bed!” On the floor by Pouncer’s food is one with an arrow pointing to a bowl. “Pouncer’s water! Keep filled up!”

  And on the kitchen table is a huge list of the phone numbers of Hughie and James (ex-half-brother-in-law), Penny, my mobile, my number in the country, the vet’s number, the emergency vet’s number…plus various other bits of information about where the burglar alarm is situated, who to ring if it goes off, where the fuse-box is…The house looks as if it’s all set up for a treasure hunt.

  Finally got off at midday, utterly exhausted with ironing clothes, putting things in my suitcase then taking them out again, worrying about whether one bottle of champagne was a good enough house present or whether I should take two or whether that would look flash.

  I drove off, and on the way down decided to look in on my father’s grave. It’s in a lovely village churchyard.

  Whenever I tell people that I’ve been to see his grave, they usually get very serious and mournful and say how “brave” I am, or how moving it must be, or some clichéd bit of nonsense. But when I visit, I don’t just think of him, and how I miss him. I also think how incredibly grateful I am to him for popping off reasonably early.
He was seventy when he died, but unbelievably, I know a man of seventy-five who’s still visiting his ancient, confused mother. It must be such a burden. Staggering up to some old people’s home, riddled with arthritis yourself, to visit a living corpse who doesn’t even recognize you. What a life. Or, rather, what a living death.

  Both my parents are dead, luckily missing the “live forever” generation from which I also hope to escape with a mixture of bravery and cunning. And sad as it is that they’ve gone, it’s good, too. After all, I don’t think you ever really become yourself while your parents are alive. Until they go, you’re still, at some level, someone’s child.

  When my father died, I felt sad, but I also felt like some plant that had been struggling to survive under a giant rhododendron bush, a bush that was so abundant and magnificent, that flowered so richly every year, that spread its beautiful great green glossy leaves so broadly, that there was hardly any place for me to breathe.

  So when I went to see him in his grave, it was really to say thanks for dying. It’s when I know how he’d laugh if he heard me that I really miss him.

  Lucy lives in a cottage deep in the country. She’s a wistful-looking person, tender, funny and deeply compassionate: She runs a charity for asylum seekers, and spends her entire life, as far as I can see, visiting wretched Rumanians—or Romanians, as they appear to be called these days—who live in frightful compounds all over Britain, and helping them fill in forms to get them out. Or fund-raising. Or campaigning for their rights.

  Anyway, during the weekend Lucy told me she had been made a Member of the British Empire, and when I asked how she was planning to celebrate when she came to Buckingham Palace to receive the award, I was horrified when she told me that she was simply going to “come down to London, get the award, have a pizza at Pizza Express and go home.”

  I couldn’t believe my ears. “But we must have a party!” I said. I’m terrible about parties. I love going to them and giving them. Any excuse. “I’ll give one for you!”

  November 14

  Now, as I start writing invitations to total strangers—Lucy gave me a guest list—I begin to feel slightly anxious. It’s bad enough giving a party oneself, but giving one for someone else—everything has to be immaculate. Was this, as my father used to ask, wise?

  Nov 18

  Came downstairs to find Maciej, my gorgeous Polish cleaner, sobbing his eyes out over the kitchen table. Turns out his pregnant girlfriend has run off with his best friend. I really love Maciej. He has fine features, like Chopin, and wonderful long hair tied in a ponytail—the only man I’ve ever seen who looks good with one. He’s not bad with a Hoover, either. Naturally, back in Poland he trained to be a biochemist or a brain surgeon or something, but can’t get a job here so is reduced to cleaning.

  I put my arms round him and gave him a hug and made him some tea, and he smoked a cigarette and told me all about it, and then Michelle came in and he quickly pulled himself together and started wiping the surfaces.

  December 1

  Penny helped me shop for the party at Marks and Spencer, which was very nice of her since she’s not coming. She’s got to go to see her daughter, Lisa, who’s recovering from a broken love affair.

  “Men!” said Penny, as we stared into the freezer section hoping to find a thousand frozen sausage rolls for under a tenner. As it was, we found only fourteen boxes of “Indian-style” cocktail snacks for some astronomical sum of money.

  “We’d need about a hundred of those,” I said. “Too expensive.”

  “Are we reduced to Iceland?”

  “We are,” I said. “Anyway. Men! Poor Lisa. I’m planning to give them up.”

  “I didn’t know you had any to give up,” said Penny. “Anyway, this boyfriend of Lisa’s, he was just so sweet! And then he says he’s frightened of commitment and gives her the boot. When am I ever going to have grandchildren?”

  “Well, I asked Jack the other day when I might hear the patter of tiny feet, and he just said, rather tersely, that I should get a dog, and then I’d hear the patter of four tiny feet,” I told her.

  Penny said: “I used to say to Lisa: ‘Wait till you’re married before you get pregnant,’ and then I said: ‘Wait till you’re in a stable relationship.’ And now, I say: ‘Oh, darling, why don’t you stop taking the pill and just have a few one-night stands?”’

  December 2nd

  It was a freezing cold day, but I dragged myself up to Harley Street to see the bunion man. A nice bloke—not the usual private consultant with a bow tie and a snotty voice and a bedside manner that oozes out of him like oil. He had a cockney accent and a practical manner, more like a builder than a medical man.

  “Oooh, you’ve got a right one there,” he said, looking at my feet, in much the same way as a gardener might remark on spotting a fearful display of greenfly, or a plumber might declare on discovering a giant leak. It is, indeed, a “right one,” a huge, red, sore lump that makes it impossible to buy any shoes other than comfortable ones. Not that I’d want to buy uncomfortable ones, but now and again it would be nice to be able to slip into an Emma Hope or a Jimmy Choo without screaming.

  “Inherited, you know,” he added, writing up his notes. “Anyone else in the family got one?”

  “We all have bunions like this,” I said, not without some pride. “It’s known as the Sharp bunion. My mother, who had one, tried hard to prevent my developing one by shoving me into Start-rite shoes from an early age, and getting my feet X-rayed on those evil machines that you used to see in shoe shops before they realized that they were belting out radiation to all their customers. She even took me to see Dr. Scholl, forcing me to wear metal supports in my shoes for three years. But nothing made any difference.”

  The bunion man scoffed. “Wouldn’t,” he said. “When would you like to come in?”

  “Hang on a minute,” I said. I felt I was being rather oversold. “What does it entail?”

  It turns out that these days you don’t have to have your leg in plaster for six weeks, which is a relief, and it is all done incredibly quickly under a local anaesthetic. Then your feet are shoved into rather weird shoes for a couple of weeks, then comfortable shoes for six, and then—“Manolo Blanket, here we come,” I interrupted cheerfully.

  “Blahnik,” he said. “And there’s no pain; you’re walking within two hours.”

  “Done,” I said.

  It’s booked for January.

  Oh dear. Is this wise?

  December 3rd

  The big day of the party. A gray Thursday afternoon, and I had pushed back all the chairs in my sitting room, sprayed it with something weird from Floris that someone had given me many Christmases back, put out the thinly sliced salami, shaken the crisps into bowls, distributed the trays of water biscuits covered with sour cream and salmon eggs, checked that the sparkly wine was cooling in the fridge, given the final touches to the flowers in the corners and polished the glasses. A thousand mini sausage rolls from Iceland were crackling in the oven.

  Glasses polishing is very important as you get older. Jack’s late godfather lived with his wife in a grisly bungalow on a private estate by the Thames, and the big drawback to visiting them, in their old age, was the filth. Cat hairs everywhere. All the surfaces covered with stickiness. And those smeary wine glasses. Not just that, but they used miniature plastic footballs as an alternative to ice cubes and, in every one of the indentations of these pink and blue spheres, lay gray and greasy dirt.

  As a result, I am scrupulous in the glasses department. (I’m told by Hughie that the older you get, the more important it is to be clean. New shirt twice a day, is his motto, and the tie must be checked hourly for stains. Bottoms of trousers also must be monitored in case they’ve brushed in the mud, and shoes must be polished every morning.)

  There was a lovely expectant preparty feeling to the room. I closed the shutters, put on the lights, turned on a low piano boogie…sat down and felt those confused feelings, a mixture of excited anti
cipation and a sinking feeling, wondering why the hell I’d thought of arranging a party in the first place. I wouldn’t know anyone there, it was stupid of me, everyone would think I was pathetic, didn’t have any friends of my own, I would just be doing a skivvying job. Thank goodness Hughie was coming to help with the drinks pouring.

  The phone kept ringing. One person asked nervously: “Could you tell me—is it safe to park near your house?” Clearly from the country.

  The fake fire puttered in the grate. On the mantelpiece in a silver frame sat a picture of Jack and Chrissie—Chrissie looking stunning as ever, with long blond hair and rather a sultry expression, and Jack looking pale and tense, smoking, his eyes bright red dots like Satan, and wearing, of all things, a suit. It had been taken a year ago, at his grandmother’s memorial service in Ireland, on the cold, gray day when she was buried, amid lots of champagne, laughter and memories of her fey Irishness, her madness.

  I had once gone round to her flat in Kensington and in the window frame was jammed a large cardboard sign, made from an old cornflakes packet. On it she had scrawled: “Who killed the owl in Avondale Park? Murder most foul. I know who killed the owl.” When I knocked, she shouted: “Who is it?” I said it was me, and she yelled: “Go away, you thief!”

  The phone rang again. “What should we wear?” A bit late to ask that, I thought. I was wearing a very nice orange-and-green-spotted skirt from Hobbs, a black T-shirt from Shepherds Bush market and a piece of fifties costume jewelry belonging to my mother, and I looked rather mad and smart.

  Outside, someone shouted “Fuck off!” into a mobile. I think it was a mobile. There was no answer. A dog started barking and a child started wailing. “Fucking cunt!” shouted someone else. “‘Oo you callin’ a fucking cunt?” The arguing voices faded down the street. “You said…” “I did not say…” “Fucking did…”

  The phone rang again. It was Jack.

  “Can you talk?” he asked. An odd question.

  “Oh, hi, darling,” I said. “Actually, I’m just sitting here feeling like a total wally waiting for people to arrive for a party that I suddenly wish I weren’t giving. How are you?”