Fifty Is Not a Four-Letter Word Read online

  “And start telling me that I’m the weakest link?” added Jack, sounding somewhat rueful.

  I kicked Olly playfully in the shins, but when he screeched, “Ow, that really hurt,” in a way that suggested it really did hurt, I found myself smiling.

  • • •

  My being born on January 1 is a mixed blessing, depending on whom you’re talking to. My mother, for example, says New Year’s Eve is her worst day of the year, because when everyone else is celebrating, she is reliving the nightmare of giving birth to me. If you were to go to a party on New Year’s Eve where my mother happened to be, you’d spot her straight off: She’d be loudly and aggressively subjecting anyone within earshot to the story of my undignified entry into the world. Later, she’d be the one curled up in a fetal position in the corner, swigging gin straight from the bottle, getting more maudlin by the minute. You can imagine why relations between me and my mother sometimes tend toward the frosty. This year, to my relief, she and Dad are going to South Africa for Christmas and staying for the New Year, so at least we’re spared her presence. My father’s presence, by contrast, is always pure pleasure. He’s the longest-suffering and cheeriest person I’ve ever met. He still adores her and what he chivalrously refers to as her “engaging eccentricity.” Even after fifty-five years of marriage. I don’t get it, but neither would I dare to question it. It’s not my business.

  • • •

  After twenty-seven hours in labor, by ten p.m. on December 31, 1952, Jenny Lyndhurst wasn’t the slightest bit interested in the symbolic nature of the date. She didn’t give a damn whether her offspring arrived before midnight, as the clock struck twelve, or never. The midwife, who’d been hoping to get off her shift at ten P.M. in order to join a group of nurses and doctors for the countdown on the hospital roof, with its panoramic views of the Thames, could barely loosen my mother’s viselike grip on her arm.

  “You can’t leave me, not now,” my mother wailed. “I’m going to die if this isn’t over soon.”

  Mary, the midwife, who was caring and Catholic and Irish, didn’t have the heart to abandon my belligerent, albeit distressed, mother. As Big Ben began to ring out for midnight, Mary exclaimed, “You’re ten centimeters dilated! We’ll soon be there, Mrs. Lyndhurst. It’s time to push; start pushing, Mrs. Lyndhurst. We’re nearly there.”

  An hour later, Mrs. Lyndhurst was still pushing and still wailing and still ranting between wails about how she’d never wanted to have a second child and how Abe, my soon-to-be father, was to blame, and how she was going to have her tubes tied the minute the baby was out, and how all midwives were sadists. Not that any of it mattered, she insisted, because she was about to die anyway.

  By this time the doctor had arrived—from the roof, presumably—wearing a silly paper hat on his head and streamers around his neck.

  “Get out of here,” Mrs. Lyndhurst screamed. “Mary, the alarm, get this intruder out of here.”

  “Calm down, Mrs. Lyndhurst, and let me have a look,” said the duty obstetrician. “Do we want to get this baby out now or not?” He bent down to look closer between my mother’s writhing, ricocheting legs, jerking his head back, then forward, then back again to avoid being hit in the face by a flailing limb.

  At the very moment he was thinking of forceps, Jenny Lyndhurst felt something rip her flesh apart. She let out a low, guttural groan that sounded nothing like the noise a human being makes. The crown broke through, and a bloody, big-headed baby slithered out of her, caught in time by the triumphant doctor. He beamed, as though he and he alone had been responsible for the successful outcome.

  “A beautiful baby girl, Mrs. Lyndhurst. My sincerest congratulations. One of the first babies of the new year, born midway through the twentieth century, at the dawning of a new era of peace and prosperity. What a blessing.”

  If she’d had the strength, my mother would have strangled the patronizing popinjay. Instead, she snapped breathlessly, “Cut the sermon, Doctor. I’d like to see my baby, if it’s all right with you.” As I was lifted and placed on her belly, a wrung-out, torn-asunder Jenny Lyndhurst relented a little. “In the spirit of the good doctor’s words, I name you Hope. As in Hope for the future. As in Hope that I never, ever have to go through this again.”

  At which point my father, who’d been pacing and intermittently peeking around the curtain for what seemed like days, walked in clutching the hand of a sleepy, confused, curly-haired two-and-a-half-year-old in a smocked dress and patent-leather shoes and with a big ribbon at the side of her head. My sister, Sarah. She, in turn, was clutching a one-eyed teddy bear. Before my father could say a word, my mother was off. “You’ve no idea what I’ve been through. And I told you not to bring her. This is no place for a child. Why isn’t she at her grandmother’s?”

  “My poor darling, you must be quite exhausted,” he replied, refusing to be riled. “But look at the little mite, she’s perfect. Look, Sarah, your lovely little sister.” Sarah took one look at me—still attached to the umbilical cord, still smeared with slime—and began to scream.

  “Congratulations, Mr. Lyndhurst, but you’re a little premature,” said Mary sternly. “All is well. But it’s nearly three o’clock in the morning, and Sarah should be in bed. According to hospital rules, you shouldn’t be here at all, and certainly not with your daughter. It disturbs the other patients at this time of night. There’s clearing up to do. And then Mrs. Lyndhurst and baby Hope need some sleep. So please go home and come back in the morning.”

  “Hope? I never … Oh, never mind. Hope, that’s the prettiest name I ever heard. Next to Sarah, that is.”

  Sarah’s head was buried in my father’s overcoat. “Baby horrid. Mummy horrid,” she sobbed. “Daddy and Sarah go home.”

  My dad smiled on regardless. He says he fell in love with both of us girls from the first second he saw us. I’ve never once had reason to doubt him.

  • • •

  Unlike my mother, I revel in having been born on January 1 around halfway through the twentieth century. It kind of puts me in the thick of things, gives my birthday an extra significance, a bit of historical context, as my dad would say. Okay, this year it has a significance I could have done without, but as a rule, it has worked in my favor. Mostly, I’ve chimed rather well with the decades. As I came in, rationing was about to go out, and by the time Harold Macmillan, in 1957, told Britons that they’d “never had it so good,” that was true of my family. I managed to squeeze in about five minutes of swinging at the end of the ’60s; I marched to a faint-hearted feminist tune in the ’70s; in the ’80s I became a working mum and soared to the peak of my profession, although I never voted for Margaret Thatcher; and in the ’90s … what did I do in the ’90s? I just carried on doing what I’d done in the ’80s, minus the shoulder pads. Oh, and I took up yoga, to which I was totally unsuited, because my head steadfastly refuses to unclutter even when I’m asleep. My fight-or-flight mechanism is on constant red alert. I’m not even sure I see the point of relaxing. It’s not doing stuff that makes me anxious. Lying on a mat with someone else’s feet too close to my nose, trying to imagine the gentle swish of waves beside the seashore, makes my breathing go all funny—fast and short and shallow, instead of slow and deep and regular.

  It seems to me that I’ve gone from zero to fifty in about the same time as it takes a Ferrari Testarossa. One second I was slithering out from between my ill-tempered mother’s legs, the next, whoosh, here I am weighing up whether to bleach or laser my incipient mustache. I don’t care what those inane glossy magazines tell you—oops, I nearly neglected to mention that I am editor in chief of one of those very same glossy magazines—but fifty is not fabulous, it’s not fun, and it definitely isn’t funny.

  I do love giving parties, though, and I would have been thrilled to be giving one on New Year’s Eve if not for the F-word.

  Jack and I sat down to do the invites under various headings. First, Family.

  “That’s easy,” said Jack, “what with my
parents both being dead and yours on holiday in Cape Town.” I ignored him and wrote down my sister, Sarah, her husband, William, and their three girls, Jessie, Amanda, and Sam.

  “Don’t forget my delightful sister,” Jack continued.

  “As if I could,” I replied glumly, adding Anita to the list. Anita, who hates me, and her husband, Rupert, who hates everybody, so at least I don’t have to take it personally. Next up my cousin Mike, who loves me, and his new boyfriend, a ruggedly handsome Slav named Stanko whom I’m prepared to love, but only once Mike tells me he is definitely The One.

  Then Best Friends, mine, Jack’s, and Olly’s (I’m already resigned to the fact that Olly and his pals will exit the party at the first opportunity), with marvelous, maddening, unpredictable Maddy—Dr. M. to her adoring patients—right at the top of the BF list; then the aforementioned BFs abroad. There are about ten of them in various parts of the globe, and they book flights as casually as they make restaurant reservations.

  After that came the second tier. Colleagues and bosses, school mums and dads (Olly would have gone ballistic if he’d seen this category on the list), old school friends whom I see once a year, neighbors so they won’t complain about the noise, plus one set of neighbors who have been promoted to New Best Friend status. (Original BFs, like Pringles Original or original Branston pickles, need to have been around for at least twenty years to qualify; NBFs can be made in a week, although you’ll never love them as much as your BFs.) What is it with me? I may be pushing fifty, but I still think like a small child. Fifty going on four. That’s part of the problem, I suppose. When the numbers reached eighty-five, Jack declared a halt.

  The guest list sorted, next came the question of food. If there’s anything that marks me out as Jewish—apart from hair that frizzes at the mere mention of the word “moisture”—it’s my attitude about food. It’s one of the many reasons Jack’s sister, Anita, hates me. I do food all the time, and in copious quantities. My fridge is so full it keeps springing back open the second I shut it. Once a frozen chicken fell out and landed on Anita’s toe, and it broke—the toe, not the chicken. Some people have second homes on the Costa del Sol; mine’s on the Finchley Road at Waitrose. Quite a hike from there to the coast.

  In the almost twenty years Jack and I have been together, we have been to Anita and Rupert’s place for dinner maybe five times. Anita has been to our place more like five hundred times. She thinks I invite her to spite her. It’s me who does Christmas, too. Jack’s a Christian (lapsed), and Olly is whatever suits him on any given day. It’s not that I particularly like cooking, but for me, friends around a table groaning with food (even if the food has come straight from the deli) is one of life’s great pleasures.

  So the food was going to have to be fantastic.

  I rang Pam. “Pam? Fancy doing a New Year’s Eve party for eighty-five?”

  A former junior editor on my magazine who left journalism only six months ago to become a caterer, Pam was perhaps a bit of a risk. But she deserved a boost, and if all went well, she’d make lots of new contacts.

  “Food stations, darling,” she insisted, “so right for you and so right for now.” I could swear Pam never called anyone “darling” before she went into the party-planning business. And I didn’t have a clue what food stations were.

  “What exactly—”

  “Grazing areas. Food stations are strategically placed so you can pick up delicious morsels of sustenance—some hot, some cold—as you go along.”

  “Aah, I see, grazing areas. Like for cows. Or sheep. Now I get it. A kind of farmyard theme, although I’d been thinking more Moroccan myself.”

  Pam gushed on regardless. “You’re so lucky to have the open plan with that divine conservatory” (more like a lean-to, but never mind), “which is just perfect for parties.”

  I hoped I hadn’t made a big mistake. Pam always was too creative to spend her days correcting punctuation, but maybe this was all getting a bit out of hand. “Delicious morsels of sustenance,” for heaven’s sake.

  “I think we’ll have a shellfish station, a cocktail bar, and several hot-food stations with a choice of dishes. All served on these dinky little dessert plates I have at the back of my van. It’s going to be quite divine.”

  Pam never used to use the word “divine,” either. I was mystified but impressed. I learned that the correct nomenclature for this new style of serving was “miniature mains.” Our miniature mains were going to be lamb with mash and mint sauce, Thai fish curry with jasmine rice, and roasted vegetables with pesto dressing for the food-combining bores.

  “And a chocolate fountain, of course. With strawberries for dipping.”

  At least I’d heard of chocolate fountains. I’d even seen a picture in the paper of George Clooney dipping his strawberry at a premiere after-party. And I liked a bit of pretension every now and then. It was all beginning to shape up.

  I actually bumped into Ravi’s mum, Nomi, in Waitrose. I couldn’t resist asking her the fabric question, and I swear she immediately volunteered for the job of accompanying me to Southall. “Sari Central,” she called it. Olly’s right, in a way, about me and the other mums. I do like getting together with them, and we do talk mostly about our boys, but why shouldn’t we? It’s comforting to be told “Ravi’s so rude to me these days” or “James was found drunk in a gutter in Leicester Square.” Less comforting to hear that a boy from Olly’s year has been expelled for selling skunk to ninth-graders. Why on earth didn’t Olly tell me? What has he got to hide?

  A Saturday morning spent in Sari Central was a great success. Thanks to Nomi’s brilliance at bargaining, for fifty quid I bought enough material to drape the entire inside of the tent as well as having some left over to cover four tall bar-style round tables we’d hired to lend an air of louche nightclub glamour to the place.

  All this displacement activity was definitely doing the trick. I had no time at all to get morbid about what was about to hit. Christmas came and went with me playing the role of whirling dervish. Friends arriving from abroad. Food, drink, talk, more food, more drink, more talk. No chance for real intimacies, just exchanges of information. More catch up than cozy up. Busy, busy, busy. Going to work is a lot less exhausting.

  My mother says I bring it on myself. Not one to hold back, she’s convinced I’m heading for a breakdown. She has been predicting it for the last twenty-five years. Anita hopes I’m heading for a breakdown. I overheard her saying to Rupert after I’d served Christmas lunch for fifteen: “Hope always has to be one better than the rest of us, but I can see it’s beginning to take its toll.” Jack hasn’t mentioned breakdowns, but he has this new method of dealing with my more manic outbursts: “Whoa, girl,” he says, as though reining in an overexcited horse. The only time he doesn’t have to rein me in is in bed. In the meantime, my sister, Sarah, is a pillar of support. Claire, who’s come all the way from Australia, would be a pillar of support if only we could manage twenty minutes alone together.

  • • •

  At 7:45 p.m. on the night of the party, I’m standing in front of the full-length mirror inside my wardrobe. I should be pleased with what I see. For a woman who’s about four hours away from being fifty, two hundred and fifty-five minutes under half a century old, I’m really not that bad. I’m really not that real, either. Tonight my hair is a dark, sleek bob. Left to its own devices, it would be 85 percent gray and 100 percent frizz. I’m wearing a little black knee-length silk jersey dress. It has a halter neck, to show off my best feature—my shoulders. Doesn’t everyone deserve a best feature? My breasts are not contenders (34A, almost); my nose is more Nefertiti than Nicole Kidman; my bottom I’d rather not talk about. Can I be the only woman in Britain who has VPL even when she isn’t wearing knickers?

  But the overall package isn’t bad. And tonight, with the help of the most extraordinary underwear ever engineered—I wouldn’t be surprised if it had been designed and built by Norman Foster—I have a pancake stomach, a bum that would put Jen
nifer Lopez out of business, and most miraculous of all, cleavage. People have often complimented me on my boyish figure. Tonight, at borderline fifty, I look like a woman. But hang on there, I’m not wearing my glasses, so I’m missing some of the important details—the stuff you can see only close up. I’ve failed to mention the deep furrows on my forehead and the angry vein that shoots from my eyebrows to my hairline, and not just when I’m angry. Then there’s the Rift Valley that runs from the outside edge of each nostril to the corners of my mouth. And finally, the neck. The neck that until two months ago was only a neck. A neck to which one never gave a second’s thought. Then boom: Overnight it collapsed into a heap, along with the chin, like a building hit by an earthquake, reduced to rubble.

  There comes a point in your life when you may still fit into a Topshop size 10, but that doesn’t stop your new neck from dictating the contents of your wardrobe. For example, it’s a complete myth that a polo-neck sweater can disguise a neck that’s lost the will to live. You can wear your neck flesh tucked in (but I guarantee you it will pop out), or you can let it all hang loose above the rim of the polo and hope small children on the street don’t mistake you for a free-range chicken. Either way you lose: Polo necks, along with miniskirts and flesh-bearing midriffs, are not to be entertained by a woman fast approaching fifty.

  I need a drink.

  “Wow!” I say as I enter the tent. It’s totally transformed. While I’ve been off to have a bath and get ready, Jack and Olly have been lighting the candles. At six o’clock it had looked the nadir of naffness, tacky even for a footballer’s wife, with its clumsy cacophony of styles. What had I been thinking, mixing Eastern exotica with American ’50s glamour? Who would ever put a cocktail lounge in the kasbah? Mark, the editor of Exquisite Interiors, one of the magazines at Global, where I work, would have had me tried for treason for less. Fortunately, he’s not invited. And now, in the glow of a hundred tiny flickering flames, the atmosphere has become magical. The fabrics shimmer. Mounds of plums, figs, pomegranates, and red grapes, dusted with icing sugar, sit in big glass bowls on tables, lending a Bacchanalian air. A Rod Stewart CD—Volume I of The Great American Songbook—plays mellow in the background.