Fifty Is Not a Four-Letter Word Read online

  • • •

  I leave them standing in forlorn clumps, like the wilted specimens on the last day of the Chelsea flower show. Back at my desk, I dial Jack.

  “Jack Steele is either on the phone or with a client. Please leave your name, number, and time of call, and he will get back to you as soon as he’s free.”

  “It’s me, darling, with some not so good news for the New Year. I’ve been put out to grass. Like the old mare that I am. Just like that. Try and call, but if I don’t pick up, it’s because mayhem has broken out. I’m taking the whole team to Baz’s bar later, so if you want to join the wake, you’ll know where to find us. Otherwise, I’ll be home late—very late and very drunk. Tell Olly, and tell him I’m fine.”

  I’ve passed the first hurdle. I’ve not let my team down. I’ve not let myself down. Now what the hell am I supposed to do?

  • • •

  Thursday night is as I knew it would be. Everyone gets rip-roaring, rat-arsed, out-of-their-brains, off-their-faces hammered. I know, these are not genteel descriptions for a woman of my age. They’re not words I normally use to describe a state of inebriation—I pick up the cool vernacular from Olly and the kids but never use it for fear of shaming Olly to death—but in the circumstances, “rat-arsed” sounds about right. I’ve told everyone who wants to invite their partners to do so. The thought of a giant hormonal gathering of hens, with Saul and Cosmo muttering on the sidelines, is more than I can handle. As it is, the tears flow as freely as the champagne, girls hug girls and swear undying love for one another, and my fashion editor announces to the entire room that if only Cosmo would let her shag him once, he would convert to heterosexuality for life. Saul and Tanya get a little too familiar in the corner (Saul’s wife isn’t here because she couldn’t find a last-minute babysitter), but then it occurs to me that if Saul and Tanya are both going to be working for Mark, they obviously have a lot to talk about.

  I drink far less than I’d expected, determined to keep my wits about me. Jack arrives around eleven o’clock, looking haggard. “It’s all right, darling, no one’s died,” I tell him brightly. “In fact, we’re having a lovely time.” Tanya, Cosmo, and Ally have burst into a spontaneous rendition of “I Will Survive,” and everyone else is whooping and Mexican-waving.

  “Jack,” I whisper, feeling a wobbly moment coming on, “please don’t say anything nice. I’m doing very well considering, but one nice word from you and I’ll fall to pieces. What I really want right now is to go home to my bed.”

  “Our bed, sweetheart.” Before the floodgates have time to open, Jack wraps an arm around me and leads me, as though I am an invalid, slowly up the stairs.

  • • •

  On Friday I go straight to HR to see what transfers might be possible. I e-mail Mark to recommend Tanya to him, making no reference to our encounter in the lift. “Tanya’s a great assistant, the best I’ve ever had. Give it some thought.” I call some of the other editors in the company and some editors I know at other publishing houses. Then I brief Megan. In the afternoon Tanya and I go through my office, sorting things into chuck piles, Megan piles, and take-home piles. I am on automatic pilot, responding but not feeling, reacting but not thinking. Better that way. Then the flowers start arriving, each new bouquet more stylishly sumptuous than the one before. Burgundy roses with winter berries from Estée Lauder. Chicly clashing tulips in reds, oranges, and pinks from Lancôme. A succession of single orchids in ceramic pots from various fashion houses and PRs. It’s called insurance. If I were to wind up in another editor’s seat in the near future, they would have already oiled the path to my office door. If I didn’t turn up elsewhere, case dismissed. I’d never hear from them again.

  The biggest bouquet of all comes from my publisher, the person responsible for the advertising and marketing strategy of the magazine. Janet is a good publisher, pragmatic and ambitious. And a terrific salesperson. She could sell a shop-windowful of cream cakes to a bunch of schoolgirl anorexics. Yes, that good. So flogging fiddly fondant fancy recipes to time-poor working mothers will be a cinch, as far as Janet is concerned. I have neither the desire nor the strength to berate Janet for not keeping me in the picture about Simon’s plans, which she clearly was in on. The difference between editors and publishers is that good editors love their magazines, they believe in them; for publishers, it’s just a job.

  What I don’t want to do is fill my home with these flowers, which would feel like being present at my own funeral. So I distribute the bouquets among the staff. Around four-thirty, I am presented with my leaving card, or rather, “the book of condolences,” as Olly dubs it later. The art department has performed a miraculous artistic feat in next to no time, being far too hungover to do any proper work. It’s an album of images of my greatest moments, receiving awards, meeting various celebrities, curtseying to Princess Diana on the polo lawn at Windsor. And, as is customary with these things, a mock-up of the front cover of the magazine with the departing member of staff as cover girl. In this case, yours truly is Photoshopped so heavily that I’ve almost morphed into Jennifer Aniston.

  At five p.m. I suggest everyone call it a day, and the hugging and the kissing start all over again. I hang on by a thread. By five-thirty I am ready to leave, just me and Tanya to go. “Tanya, please don’t say anything more. I may be old enough to be your mother, but I’m also young enough to be your friend if you’d like me to be. We can meet for coffee, you and James can come for dinner, and if Mark gives you trouble, he’ll have me to deal with.”

  “Oh, Hope …”

  “Oh, Tanya, you soppy thing, come here and give me a hug.”

  • • •

  I act almost normal over the weekend. After all, it is the weekend, and I wouldn’t be at work anyway. The nights are tricky. Sex, of course, is out of the question. I don’t think Jack is much in the mood himself, to be honest. Sleep would have been out of the question, too, but half a Zopiclone sends me straight into a blissful, dreamless eight-hour coma.

  Olly is angelic. He takes me and Jack to a matinee of sing-along Grease at the Prince Charles Cinema. Incredible how a ’70s film about a bunch of American high school kids in the ’50s can stand the test of time. Olly and his generation are as much fans of the movie as our lot were. He played the Frankie Avalon part in a school version of the show last year, greased-back hair, padded-out front, totally hilarious. But I still think Olivia Newton-John’s a drip: Even dressed head to toe in leather for the finale, she looks about as sexy as a bar of soap. Whereas Stockard Channing as the plucky Rizzo—what a great girl. From now on, Rizzo will be my role model.

  “Greased Lightning.” “Summer Nights.” “There Are Worse Things I Can Do.” For 110 glorious minutes, I forget being fifty, I forget being fired, I even forget my sweaty legs. And when we go for Chinese in Soho after the movie, I keep the conversation strictly neutral. Every time I’m tempted to mention Vanessa the Undresser, I shovel a mound of rice into my mouth and chew and chew and chew until the temptation to talk goes away.

  Jack agrees to field all phone calls for me, except for any from my sister, Sarah, or my friend Maddy.

  My sister is psychic where I’m concerned, and she’s already suspicious. “Something’s up, isn’t it? I can tell,” she says when she rings on Saturday morning. All I’ve said is hello.

  “Everything’s fine,” I reply. “I’m just grumpy about being so old.”

  “ ‘Fine’ means not fine,” she says. “Whenever you use that word, I know you’re not fine at all.”

  “Just shut it, Sarah. Just this once. Give me a break. Okay?”

  Now she can be absolutely certain that I’m keeping something from her. But she’ll have to live with it until I’m ready to talk.

  I tell Sarah everything (usually), and I tell my friend Madeleine almost everything, but her sister is in a hospice, dying of melanoma that has spread to her bones, and the last thing she needs to hear about right now is my troubles. So when she calls, we talk about the party and catch up on her sister.

  Whenever anyone else rings, Jack tells them I am out. I am curled up in the corner of the sofa in my dressing gown, aimlessly plucking hairs from my legs, my fingernails standing in as tweezers. It’s tricky at first, but with practice, you soon get the hang of it.

  • • •

  Sunday is a write-off. I lie in bed until ten a.m., staring at the ceiling. I wash my hair and iron tea towels in the basement. Ironing tea towels, I find, is extremely therapeutic. The rest of the ironing I leave to my cleaner, but tea towels are my personal province. I listen to The Archers omnibus, then leaf without much interest through the papers. In normal circumstances, I’d be scrutinizing them intently, circling stories with Magic Marker for ripping out later in the day, when Jack and Olly have done with them. Although I’m not sure Olly ever gets past the sports section.

  And that’s about it. I try starting to read The Little Friend, Donna Tartt’s first book for ten years since her best-selling The Secret History. But it’s a terminally depressing story about a twelve-year-old girl determined to avenge the death of her older brother who was found hanging from a tree in the family yard. I snap it decisively shut. The most decisive thing I’ve done all day.

  Olly announces he is going out. “Out anywhere in particular?” I ask casually. “Just out,” he replies. Images of Olly being suffocated by Vanessa the Undresser’s enormous bosoms float across my vision. Jack tries to get me to talk to him, but for once I am all talked out. I hit the vodka bottle. Jack goes to the study, sits at his computer, and hits Google. I manage to down three big ones, neat except for ice, before falling awkwardly asleep with my head scrunched up in the corner of the couch.

  By the time I wake up with a cricked neck at one a.m., Jack is in bed. I creep u
pstairs so as not to wake him. Passing the closed door of Olly’s bedroom, I wrap my hand round the doorknob and start to slowly turn it. He’s seventeen, Hope, I chide myself. Home or not home, it has nothing to do with you. I hold on to the doorknob, then slowly, reluctantly, unwrap my hand. Redundant editor, redundant mother. All I need to hear now is that Jack is having an affair. Then I can be a redundant wife as well.

  Neighborhood Watch

  I used to think Bob Geldof got it wrong. When I was working, I absolutely loved Mondays. Couldn’t wait to start the week, although I looked forward to weekends as well. My life was like a sandwich: Weekdays were the bread, two sturdy slices of healthy wholemeal on the outside, protecting the weekend, that delicious, indulgent filling in the middle. But the thing about a sandwich is that even if the filling is the best bit, it wouldn’t be a sandwich without the bread for support; the filling would lose its form and luster. Without the filling for contrast, the bread would become prosaic, necessary but dull. Now weekdays and weekends are indistinguishable: It’s all bread, or all filling, depending on your point of view. But definitely no longer a sandwich. And in my case, a stale old loaf. I miss my old life as a sandwich, and I have no idea if I’ll ever get it back. Or even if I want it back, which strikes me as strange and disconcerting.

  There are certain things I’ve learned since giving up work. I should say since work gave me up. For a start, the world is full of other people who don’t work, at least not during daylight. Young people, old people, in-between people. Everywhere you go, there are people not working. After twenty-eight years of slogging fulltime in an office, I find this a revelation.

  Hundreds of thousands of them are out there, millions for all I know, buying stuff they don’t need and, because they’re not working, probably can’t afford. Chatting casually in cafés, arms resting on the back of banquettes as if they’re settling in indefinitely. And I thought you were meant to knock your coffee back in one gulp, coat still on, then leap up and out the door quicker than you could say “double espresso.” I’ve even witnessed people reading newspapers at a leisurely pace, story by story, one at a time. This is all so new to me. I used to whiz through three broadsheets and three tabloids quicker than a virus scanner. I was all done in the time it takes these people to read the front-page headlines.

  There’s loads of pre-watershed violence and swearing going on. It’s women mostly, threatening small toddlers and large dogs, usually both at the same time.

  Another thing I’ve noticed is men loitering up against lampposts, talking into cell phones cradled in the crook of their necks and making weird hand signals to other lamppost loiterers farther down the road. I’m not sure if this is a national phenomenon. I live on the borders of Kilburn, and Kilburn is teeming with loiterers. I suppose it could be work they’re doing, just not the kind of work I’m familiar with.

  Kilburn is also home to the sleight-of-hand merchants. Now, these cool young dudes in shiny sportswear are definitely doing some kind of work, but I don’t think they get pay stubs at the end of the month. They have this way of skimming by one another in an arcane version of pass the parcel, only in this case, the parcel’s so small as to be invisible to the average passerby. Funny what you notice when you stop running. It’s even crossed my mind that I could retrain as a narc. Well-dressed fifty-year-old woman. They’d never suspect.

  Where I actually live is West Hampstead. Or South Hampstead, as real estate agents have recently attempted—and failed—to rename it, in a bid to rid the area of its student-dorm image, an image that’s at least twenty years out of date. But there does remain something determinedly scruffy about the area, as though the locals banded together and made a populist proclamation to disdain gentrification. And this despite the area’s broad leafy streets and huge houses ranging from elegant early Victorian white stucco to the comfortably sprawling Edwardian villas built for middle-class professionals. Nowhere is West Hampstead’s indifference to going upscale more pronounced than on West End Lane, a high street as dreary as the prospect of watching a TV chef boiling an egg. Which is why I tend to venture farther afield for my investigations into the strange new world of people not chained to a desk.

  I’m starting to feel at home in grotty, gritty Kilburn with its pound shops, bingo halls, and Irish pubs, and the recent fashion phenomenon that is Primark. Primark is where you hand over twenty pounds, leave the shop with two head-to-toe outfits that are dead ringers for Marc Jacobs, and then spend the rest of the day feeling guilty about the worker exploitation required to produce decent clothes for so little money. Or so people tell me. My shopping urge has gone the way of my sex drive.

  Before this latest installment of my life, Kilburn was an area I avoided like bird flu. What I like best of all about Kilburn now is that you don’t have to dress up for it. Hampstead and St. John’s Wood, my other local stomping grounds, are a different matter altogether. A lot more effort is required in terms of grooming (French manicures de rigueur), but the people-watching is equally fascinating. In Hampstead, the only people who loiter are the traffic wardens. Traffic wardens do great business in Hampstead. The place is teeming with yummy mummies who overrun their meter time, being unavoidably detained in Whistles or Carluccio’s. When Olly was born, yummy mummies hadn’t been invented. Mummies went back to work and did something called juggling. Some still do, but not this lot, that’s for sure.

  You’d never believe these women had borne babies at all, from their model-perfect bodies, airbrushed faces, and shiny, flicky hair. But you do know they’re mothers because they’re sitting in Carluccio’s on their cell phones, and issuing instructions to their au pairs about what Skye or Mia or Orlando should be having for lunch. Since most of these lunches seem to consist of jars of ready-made mush—organic, of course—I’m not sure why the au pairs can’t be left to decide between the chicken and rice or the turkey and carrots on their own. I used to let Olly’s nannies make lots of their own decisions. Which is how Olly became an early prison visitor when one nanny decided to take him along on a visit to see her boyfriend, who was doing three years for armed robbery. She told the prison officers that Olly was her son and her boyfriend the father. I found out because the nanny told one of the other nannies, who told her boss, who told me.

  Meanwhile, sitting alone at the next table pretending to read the Guardian, I feel like an interloper in a warren of chic rabbits, all nibbling happily on rocket leaves with a touch of balsamic, while I clumsily tuck into scrambled eggs with bacon, field mushrooms, and fried tomatoes.

  At Waterstone’s, you get a different crowd, yummy mummies not really being the reading type. It’s always busy in Waterstone’s, even midweek, but I reckon that’s because there are so many Hampstead authors who spend their days anxiously checking up on how their books are selling. I know they’re authors only because I keep overhearing them telling the sales assistants that they’d be more than happy to sign some of their unsold copies as a gesture of goodwill. I wonder when they actually get down to any writing.

  When all other activities are exhausted, I head for St. John’s Wood High Street. If St. John’s Wood had been used as a template for multicultural society by the likes of Bush, Blair, and Saddam Hussein, the term “clash of civilizations” never would have been invented. Here’s where rich Arabs, rich Jews, and rich Americans live side by side in perfect harmony, triple-parking their Mercs, their SUVs, and their Aston Martins with total disregard for the law and East-West politics. Just moments away are a couple of synagogues, the Regent’s Park mosque, and the American school, a melting pot of wealth and cultural mores. Admittedly, the school and the synagogues are swarming with security guards, which is understandable in these uncertain times, and the mosque may well be fomenting terrorists in its basement. But any day of the week, pop into Panzers, the local deli-cum-greengrocer where a single lettuce can set you back four quid, and all seems right with the world and its warring factions. St. John’s Wood women certainly don’t work.