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

by Virginia Ironside

  “He is absolutely lovely,” I said, on the verge of tears. “I can’t wait for you to see him!”

  “And have they decided on a name?” asked David, nervously.

  “Gene,” I said. “And do you know,” I added, meaning every word of it, “it’s a wonderful name! It suits him down to the ground. He looks like a Gene, he breathes like a Gene, he just is a Gene…”

  David burst out laughing.

  September 3

  Rang Penny to ask if she’d like to come with me to see Gene sometime. Oddly, she didn’t seem terribly keen, though she’s agreed to pop in one day when Jack brings him over. Simply cannot understand why anyone would not want to see Gene, since he is so incredibly interesting and charming. Hughie says that all babies look the same. I say that all babies look the same—except for Gene, who, oddly, is the only baby I’ve come across who is so exceptionally lovely looking with such intelligent eyes, such a kindly face…

  Managed, after hours of chatting about Gene, to remember to ask Penny how she was, and she said she’d just come back from the Family Records Office.

  “Why on earth did you go there?” I asked.

  “I wanted to find out how old the philosophy professor really was,” she said. “He certainly isn’t the age he says he is, that’s for sure. I was going to go back today to look him up in other years in the directories, but you won’t believe this: I suddenly couldn’t remember his last name!”

  “A senior moment?” I suggested.

  “A CRAFT moment,” she said.

  “What’s a CRAFT moment?” I asked.

  “Can’t Remember a Fucking Thing,” said Penny.

  September 4th

  Having taken Pouncer to the vet last week and discovered he has an overactive thyroid and kidney problems, I have spent the last few days trying to shove pills down his throat. It is extremely difficult to do this on your own, as it involves completely disabling him with one hand and, with the other, opening his mouth and throwing a pill into the far regions, and then shutting his mouth and stroking his throat till he gulps. I’ve already got two nasty bites like that and last year, when I was involved in the same pill-chucking procedure, got a wound that went septic, and then I had to go on antibiotics.

  No one to stuff them down my throat, though, luckily.

  I’ve tried sneaking the pills into pieces of fillet steak, but he has an amazing way, even when I bury the pills deep inside, of managing to remove them before eating the meat.

  However, today I have discovered some cunning camouflage chaps, called Tab Pockets, soft little squidgy cat treats with slits in them in which you conceal the pill.

  Today Pouncer ate one.

  Poor fool!

  September 8

  All these dreams. I am being driven crazy by them. Last night I dreamed that I was in some kind of work camp. I had two babies and I was given a syringe with which to inject them with some lethal poison. When I’d finished, I said to a passing woman who was wearing a green, flowered, ragged dress: “I am so unhappy. Please put your arms around me and squeeze me like an orange.” After she had done this she gave me a chain that her husband had given her, which turned into a piece of green soap, shaped like a baby’s hand, which melted in the bath.

  Where do they come from, these dreams? I once went to the most frightful counselor when I was feeling I couldn’t cope, as we all do at some point in our lives, and she always wanted to know my dreams, which she would interpret in weird ways. Once I dreamed I was trying to work out the VAT on a new fridge and she assured me that really I was dreaming about vats of wine. Pretty peculiar leap, if you ask me. I think, as counselors so often say in their soft, knowing voices, that it said more about her than it did about me. Ha!

  Unfortunately far too late to reveal this interpretation to her, which would have reduced her, I like to think, to complete pulp.

  I wonder if all this anxiety I’m suddenly feeling isn’t a kind of postnatal depression? Can grannies get postgrannie depression? PGD? I certainly don’t feel “myself.” Though what on earth “myself” actually is, I have no idea. Suddenly starting to worry terribly about dummies, which I think are an essential part of a baby’s emotional health. Have a horrible idea that Jack and Chrissie may consider them naff.

  September 9th

  In order to get all these horrid thoughts out of my mind and to throw a bit of reality on the situation, I went to see Gene. Not as simple as it seems, of course, since I have to disguise my visits so I don’t appear too desperate to pop in.

  “I was thinking of going to Tate Modern this afternoon,” I said, when I rang Jack. “And as it’s only halfway to you, I wondered if I might drop by?”

  Two days ago I’d rung saying: “I’ve got to go to Chelsea…just wondered if you were in, as it’s only a few minutes away.”

  Yesterday: “I had ten people to dinner last night, and have a lot of stew left over. Would you like it for supper? I’m going to be your way…”

  Jack and Chrissie must think I spend all my time in South London. It’s tragic. Particularly tragic as, in order to make my excuses vaguely valid (excellent as I am at lying to other people, I just can’t lie to Jack) I do indeed have to “do something in Chelsea,” or whatever, on my way. So far this has involved going round the most ludicrously expensive wallpaper shops and even dropping in to Peter Jones, purely in order to give my journeys some kind of authenticity. And I suppose, today, I will be obliged to see something at Tate Modern—groan.

  Later

  Not that easy when you’re in a car because you have to park miles away, practically in Greenwich, and walk. By the time I got to the Turbine Hall, I was so bad-tempered I stumped around the Rachel Whiteread installation in a very cross mood. Then I found that I couldn’t get to the second floor of the shop through the bottom floor of the shop—only out of the door and up some other stairs—and my mood worsened. Then the exit that would have taken me out to look at the river was roped off with ribbons and arrows. And the loo was on yet another floor.

  Finally staggered up to the fourth floor to see the Henri Rousseau. At the door, the girl said: “Tickets for sale on the lower ground floor.”

  So I simply stumped out and back to the car. Stump. Stump. Stump. Who wants to see Henri Rousseau anyway? Just a lot of old tigers in jungles. Probably seen them all in France years ago. One of those painters who’s just as good reproduced in books. Grr! As one of his tigers might have said. Though actually quite relieved to have an excuse to get down to see Gene rather earlier.

  “You needn’t pretend, Mum,” said Jack kindly, when I arrived and he rumbled my pathetic strategies. “Come over anytime you want.”

  “But if I did I’d be here all the time!” I said. “I’d be living with you! I’d never go away!”

  At that moment Gene suddenly woke up, screaming. Jack held him and jigged him about but nothing helped. Finally I took him and stuck my finger in his mouth. He latched on to it and nearly sucked the nail off.

  “He can’t be hungry, he’s just been fed,” said Jack wearily.

  “What this little chap needs is a dummy,” I said.

  “A dummy!” said Jack. “But they look revolting! Chrissie would never allow a dummy in the house!”

  “Now you’ve got a baby you can’t start worrying about aesthetics, for God’s sake,” I said. “I had to put up with going out with you wearing nothing but a dreadful Bri-Nylon Spider-Man suit for six months when you were small, darling. Dummies are essential. Babies suck on them for comfort.”

  Oh dear. I just can’t stop looking at Gene. I can’t stop thinking about Gene. I’m like a lovelorn teenager pining for Cary Grant. Well, not Cary Grant. Who used I to pine for? Ashamed to say it was Richard Burton, a man whose very pockmarked face now gives me the creeps.

  Get back to find a message from Penny saying she has some amazing news to tell me.

  September 10

  It was a completely different Penny who rang on my bell that evening. She was all
aflutter, giggly and, I have to say it, rather irritating. I spent about twenty minutes telling her all about Gene and how brilliant he was, until I finally remembered to offer her a drink and allowed her to get a word in edgeways.

  “I’ve got a boyfriend!” she burbled. “And he’s only thirty! And he knows my real age! And he doesn’t mind!”

  Horrible as it is to admit, I felt rather put out. I always felt she was a loyal friend, and to find she’s now got some bloke is extremely irritating, happy as I am for her to have found someone. I mean, she is going to be sixty next month, and thirty is on the young side. It can’t last. And I found myself telling her so rather too quickly. We sat down in the garden (on the nice new stripey chairs I got from Tesco last week) catching the last of the September sun. Pouncer was sitting staring out of a bush, watching the woodpigeons on the lawn.

  “I know it can’t last,” she said, rather irritably. She picked at a piece of salami I’d got from the slimy delicatessen. “I’m not a complete fool. But I actually met him last weekend, and he said he fancied me and I just can’t believe it.”

  “And what about the philosophy professor from Northumberland?”

  “Oh, dreadful man. Turned out he was seventy-seven. Hair growing out of his nose,” she said dismissively. “But Gavin, he’s totally wonderful!”

  “Married?” I asked. “Unspeakably unattractive? Looking after four severely disabled children? Mentally ill?” I ticked off all the likely pitfalls.

  “No…isn’t it extraordinary?” she gushed.

  “Look, if he fancies a woman of nearly sixty, there’s got to be something wrong with him,” I reasoned.

  “I know, I know,” she said, half sobbing with delight. “But I don’t care. He’s just so-so-o sweet! He says I’m his soul mate. And we have everything in common. He’s got exactly the same ideas about interior decorating as I have, and has got the most wonderful taste. And guess what he was reading—Death in Venice…the most wonderful book in the world, as you know, and he used to stay in exactly the same house where I used to stay in Norfolk when he was small, he even knows the PR agency I used to run, and says it is brilliant. He just loves Eartha Kitt, who, of course, is magnificent, and Lena Horne, and has seen The Wizard of Oz ten times. I’ve just never met anyone I’ve had so many connections with. I feel as if I’ve met my long-lost brother. And he fancies me!”

  “Well, good for you,” I said, but my heart wasn’t in it. I was sort of jealous—and sort of annoyed because I knew it would all end in tears, and I would be on the receiving end of countless miserable phone calls, and partly terribly sorry for her. Thirty years’ age difference just doesn’t work.

  Apparently Penny met this guy on some weird writing course where he fell for her hook, line and sinker. He runs a crystal healing shop in Glastonbury and she’s going to spend the night with him next Friday.

  “But what will you do about sex?” I asked.

  “I don’t know!” she said rather desperately. “I’ve gone to the doctor to go back on HRT and she’s given me some Orthogynol cream to shove into myself, which apparently makes the vagina more lubricated, but I’m sure it’s going to be agony.”

  “I’m sure it will be,” I said, remembering the last time I’d had sex. After the menopause your vagina gets all dry and miserable and having sex is like having oneself rubbed down with sandpaper on the inside. “I’d use K-Y Jelly as well, if I were you. I think I may have some upstairs.”

  And I went up to my grandmother’s old chest of drawers and rummaged around among the death pills. Sure enough, there was some ancient K-Y, long past its sell-by date, but it looked to me as lugubrious as ever was. If that’s the right word. Lubricious? Lubricative?

  “Why on earth have you got this?” asked Penny, when I brought it downstairs.

  “Never you mind,” I said. “But you bung that up yourself and I’m sure you’ll be fine.”

  “His mother’s only forty-eight!” moaned Penny. “Oh, it’s so awful, and so wonderful. And it’s doomed, all doomed. And I’m going to be so miserable. Oh, Marie, why did I get into this fix? I wish I were strong-minded like you.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “Have a good time. I’ll ‘be there for you’ when it’s over.”

  “Oh, Marie, it’s ‘come to that’!” moaned Penny, “You’ll ‘be there for me.’ This doesn’t look promising, not promising at all. It’s just that he’s such, such a darling…”

  I didn’t like the sound of this “darling” one bit, but tried to appear light-heartedly enthusiastic about the whole business. The trouble with Penny is that, although she’s quite sensible and feet on the ground most of the time, when it comes to men she can suddenly tumble down a black hole and then it’s chaos and the seventh circle of hell. And who is the one who’s sending baskets down on ropes to try to haul her up? None other than yours truly, sensible old Marie.

  “The funny thing is that when one’s young one thinks, ‘Oh it can’t last because the man doesn’t want marriage and children,’ and when one’s old, one thinks, ‘Oh, it can’t last because the man probably does want marriage and children,’ and one can’t give them to him!” said Penny. “And honestly, Marie, you’re right. It has no future. There’s no way we’ll be together for longer than three months at the most.”

  “Archie’s got a young Swedish girl of thirty-five,” I said. “Only minutes after Philippa died.” I was surprised to find that as I said it, I felt a pang of something.

  “But you know it’s completely different for men,” said Penny rather crossly.

  “Barbara Windsor married a man twenty-six years her junior,” I said, trying to be consoling. “Joan Collins and what’s-his-face, thirty years younger?”

  “Marie, don’t bullshit. You know and I know that this is going to end in tears,” said Penny with a flash of her old self. “And the other awful thing is that because I, like you, am a sixties’ girl, I go straight back into that servile ‘yes-you’re-a-man-I’ll-do-anything-you-want’ mode when these days all that’s changed.”

  “Maybe that’s what he loves about you,” I said.

  “Marie, I’m depending on you, during this whole disastrous caper, to help be my sensible self,” said Penny. “I rely on you to pour cold water on everything. Don’t start encouraging me in my madness. Please. Though thank you,” she added, changing like Eve (as in The Three Faces of, the movie), getting suddenly all girlish and fluttery, “for the K-Y. Oh, I can’t stop thinking about him! It’s awful!”

  There was a pause while she stared at her empty glass. I suddenly caught on and rushed to the fridge to get the bottle to top her up. When I got back I was astonished to see tears had come to her eyes.

  “You should feel happy, not miserable,” I said, putting my arm round her.

  “But I know already that the relationship hasn’t got a hope,” she said, rather sadly. “You see, you’ve got Gene to love. But I don’t have anyone.”

  And I suddenly realized how selfish I’d been, always talking to Penny about Gene. It must have been much more painful and envy-making for her than it was for me hearing her talking about this bloke.

  But Gavin! Glastonbury! Practically half her age! How could she?

  Later

  Pouncer has discovered the Tab Pocket trick, and now refuses to eat them. Back to the throat-stuffing.

  Later

  Went to the shops and coming back was amazed to be met by a woman in a burqa speeding toward me on one of those disabled motorized chair things. She had slowed down just before my house and as I passed she waved angrily at a man who’d obviously insulted her in the street. “Fucking Irishman!” she shrieked in a strong cockney accent, from inside her black shroud. “I’m more fucking English than you are!”

  Later

  Penny rang with a query: “What does K-Y actually stand for?” she asked.

  Sep 12

  Rather worried because yesterday Michelle hurried up to her room with a man in tow—and not just any man: a man twic
e her age (but probably half mine). I only glimpsed him on the stairs, but I saw that he was missing one tooth, had a ring through one ear, was half-shaven and his jacket smelled strongly of dope. Having been around so many addicts in the sixties, I have one of those noses that can sniff dope out at twenty paces. In fact, if I were paid enough, I’d be happy to shuffle round Heathrow on my hands and knees checking suitcases for drugs.

  When, later, I asked her what he did, she looked very dreamy and told me, simply, that Harry, for that is his name, was “a genius.”

  “What do you mean, a genius?” I asked, immediately suspicious. He hadn’t looked like a genius to me.

  “He ees poet,” she said. “He ees writer, film director, designer of gardens, photographer, he write plays, he ees performance artist, he create installations…”

  The poor girl thought that the more professions she laid on this wretch, the more impressed I would be, but quite the reverse. Being old and experienced, with every new talent this man went down in my estimation rather than up.

  “Darling,” I said. “I think he’s a bullshit artist.”

  “Bullsheet?” said Michelle. “He ees certainly artist,” she added, her face suffused with admiration.

  “Well, next time he comes round, introduce him to me,” I said rather sharply. She said she would. One look at my knowing old bat face, I knew, would keep this creep away for good. I’ve fallen for my fair share of “geniuses” in my time. Been to bed with them. Lent them money. Believed them when they said it had fallen down a drain and could they have some more. The genius can’t fool me.

  Sep 13th

  Just read today that grannies are more likely to get heart attacks than people who aren’t grannies. Can’t understand it. Total tosh. Far from courting a heart attack, being a grannie, for me at least, makes me feel there is even more reason to go on living than before. And these days the irrational worries I used to have about Jack have practically disappeared—because I know that now he has to take charge of someone else, he, too, will become even more responsible than he was before.