Page 4 of The Dolce Vita Divas
I’d had to have a knee replacement (fell off a pavement), I’d been made to retire (cutbacks in the budget and the ever-present improvements that never seemed to improve anything), our daughters, Jessie and Katherine, and our son Alexander had all married and left home for jobs in London, Birmingham and Reading. The girls had produced children of their own (two granddaughters, Violet and Maudie), and Greg had flown the nest too (new wife in Dublin – Thin Blonde Trollop, or TBT as I preferred to call her).
Which left me on my own in a quite nice house in a small town, with a garden that, if I was honest, was a bit too big for me to manage, and a granny flat over the garage where ten days ago my son Alex had moved back for a ‘short time while everything is sorted out’ following the inevitable breakdown of his marriage. And to be fair, he hadn’t been any trouble so far, so I really couldn’t complain.
I had a reasonable pension from my years as a teacher too. So I couldn’t exactly say I was suffering. But my goodness, even knowing Alex was in the self-contained flat nearby, I was lonely. And sort of rudderless. This wasn’t what I had expected.
But what had I been anticipating for my – what were they called – golden years? I supposed a home together where Jessie, Kat and Alex came to visit us with their families. Where Greg and I would be the focal point of family events and celebrations. A couple of older, wiser, cuddly people that the younger generations respected as they sat around us, faces glowing from the firelight as we dispensed good advice after yet another of my marvellous Sunday lunches.
Greg and I would live out our days with each other, getting used to being older, overlooking each other’s irritating habits and perhaps coping with life together.
Nope.
That wasn’t how it went.
Greg left the day after my fifty-eighth birthday with the TBT (initially dismissed by him as being rather young, too thin, obsessed with horses and a bit neurotic) who had been mentioned in passing over the last two years. A great PA but, as Greg said, a bit ditzy. What did that even mean?
I looked it up on Google once. She was either scatterbrained or was covered in a pattern of small, random motifs, typically flowers. Maybe she was both?
Apparently the last time Jess had seen him, Greg had been complaining about the cost of keeping TBT’s small but high-maintenance horse in a livery stables, not to mention the price of snaffles and leg bandages and whatever else it was that horse needed. Kat had once shown me a picture on Facebook, where Greg was hanging on to the horse’s bridle while TBT held up a red rosette in triumph. He looked slightly terrified, and she looked about twenty-one. Heaven knows what she saw in him. Jess said every time she saw him he was grumpy and dissatisfied and complaining about food allergies. She tried to be kind and wondered if he had IBS, and Alex asked her if she meant Irritable, Boring and Selfish. No comment.
After I retired, I’d filled my days with routine. Cleaning, social media, laundry, although there wasn’t much of it those days, occasional lunches with friends, letter writing, gardening. But I began to realise that being out in the garden sometimes made me sad. Every little blossom, resurrected plant and border were things only I saw. No one but me exclaimed in delight when the lilac bloomed or the tree at the end of the garden finally produced apples after sulking for two years.
I didn’t want to live like this, on the edge of everything. I hated the thought that maybe the most exciting part of my life was behind me. ‘The best years of your life’, that was a phrase I sometimes thought about. Was the best really behind me? How incredibly depressing. And I’d hardly done any of the things I’d meant to do. I’d just done what had been expected of me, what was right. I’d wanted to make other people proud of me, but was I proud of myself? I wasn’t sure.
In fact, I wondered if I had got to the stage in my life when I was just taking up space rather than contributing to anything.
I’d had a good career working as a teacher, ending up as a headmistress of a small village school, so that was worthwhile. I had a decent pension, which Greg’s lawyers had not gone after as Alex had threatened that if he did, he personally would never speak to him again. There are occasions when one’s children can be surprisingly supportive.
So on the surface I had nothing to complain about. But apart from feeling in control of things, I wanted to feel needed. Included. Proud of myself. And sometimes I didn’t feel any of those things.
I had people to talk to though, neighbours and ladies who worked in the little local shops, occasionally visits from past pupils and colleagues, and of course news from my two friends from university days. Ellen and Susie. I had Juliette too, who was my nearest neighbour. She lived in what would have been called the big house when I was a child. A rambling old rectory which backed on to my garden. The fence dividing our plots had blown down the winter after I had moved in, and rather than either of us mending it, Juliette had taken to just wandering in unannounced, usually with a cake so she was always sure of a warm welcome.
Then suddenly I reached the time in life when illness and deaths and funerals were things that happened to people I knew, contemporaries with whom I had worked, not just to other people’s parents or older relatives.
Ellen – talented, bright and beautiful – who sadly after months of an unnamed ailment, which she had dismissed as nothing particular, died five years ago, and by then I hadn’t seen her for a long time thanks to the travel restrictions, except on Zoom calls, not since she’d gone to live in Italy.
And now Susie wanted to celebrate my birthday. Was being sixty-five something to celebrate? Well, I supposed it beat the alternative.
She had been most insistent. She had been going through problems with her partner Simon for some time, but even at sixty-three she could still think of reasons to have fun and excuses to behave in a way people would not expect of women our age, which I was beginning to see was an excellent mindset. Despite the lessons we should have learned from the scrapes we had got into when we were younger.
Dressing downs at university when we had been caught doing something wrong – as we always were. Later on, parking fines when her assurances that ‘no one ever comes to check this street after six o’clock’ proved to be repeatedly inaccurate. Dreadful hangovers from homemade wine. Photographic evidence that although Madonna might have been able to pull off ripped jeans, lace mittens and bits of ribbon tied everywhere, we hadn’t. Perhaps Ellen had, because she was an art student and naturally stylish. Susie back then was little and blonde and had the ability to look both innocent and dangerous at the same time. I had just looked like a crazy bag lady.
Since then, the three of us had gone our separate ways but with Ellen away in her home on Capri, Susie and I tried to meet up every few weeks, leaving our significant others and my children at home while the two of us went to a wine bar to eat overpriced salad and catch up with each other’s news.
Over the years, the topics had changed from the excitement of getting married, having babies – or in Susie’s case not getting married or having babies – the terrible twos, house moves, Ofsted inspections, annual work appraisals, relationship problems, travel adventures and exam results, and then the topics sliding away into empty nesting, random health scares, grandchildren and cholesterol levels. Far more things to worry about it seemed, and looking back, it was much more fun being young. Adulting is a heavy load.
‘It doesn’t have to be,’ Susie said when I voiced that opinion one Friday evening as we finished a chilled bottle of Chablis. ‘We can still have fun at our age, just more carefully so we don’t hurt ourselves.’
I looked across the table at her. Sometimes, she didn’t seem to have changed at all since the day she had swung on the door of my student room, asking if I had a cigarette lighter. Yes, her hair was grey and her face more lined, but I’d read that wrinkles are where the smiles have been, and Susie did have a very smiley face. And sparkling blue eyes. Two things which had got her out of trouble or into an exclusive club on more than one occasion.
‘And we can afford to do things, some things anyway. I’m not up for a world cruise. Jo, you are going to be sixty-five next month. I think that calls for a celebration, don’t you? I think we should have a mini break. Somewhere lovely, without Simon, where we can get a massage or something. And we don’t have to cook anything or clear up. I’ll sort it out,’ Susie said, as she had many times over the years. When she was younger she had always been up for a party, a festival or a concert.
‘As long as you don’t get a lot of grief from Simon when you get back. I know what he can be like.’
‘Oh, him,’ Susie said, pulling a face. ‘I’m beginning to realise we might not go the distance after all. I know we’ve been together for a while but recently I’ve realised I have more fun without him. Is that very disloyal of me?’
‘No,’ I said, secretly relieved that perhaps Susie was seeing what everyone else had thought for years. ‘But is being sixty-five really something to celebrate? And what about Alex now he’s moved back in with me? Do you think I should leave him on his own?’
‘Yes,’ she said firmly, ‘he is after all a grown-up with a job and solicitors fees to pay, and he’s not exactly mooning around the place being miserable, is he? And never mind him, remember poor Ellen. She died at sixty-one. Far too young. I sometimes forget, and think about emailing her, and then I remember all over again. But we are still here, like Elton says, still standing.’
