The Coming of Age September Part 2

18th September. I go home because my friend Jean, who is now 81, has a party to celebrate her birthday and I am invited. It will be quite nice to talk not about babies, and not stare admiringly at Jake all the time. Jake is a uniquely wonderful baby and the three of us have spent a week talking about and looking at nothing else.

At Jean’s, we start off sitting down and I am next to twice-divorced alcoholic, Francis Jamieson. He is extremely morose and I try very hard to amuse him then all of a sudden I think, What the hell. Why am I trying so hard to be nice, witty, charming for this boring man? So I get up and walk away.

Luckily Jean is not in austerity mode today. Last time I saw her she was telling me how she had managed for a week on a pound of rice and some chopped herbs, and then there was the trip to Paris fuelled solely by dried prunes. I have two glasses of wine in quick succession. I would have had a third but the bottle I have been pouring from is empty and Francis Jamieson seems to have cornered the rest.

There are lots of people there that I wish I could avoid, or who seem to be trying to avoid me. Vivien Ashpole, for example, a terrible food snob. I asked her and her husband to dinner once and happened to mention that the dessert was one of Delia Smith’s and she looked as though someone had given her a dose of sump oil. She has hardly spoken to me since.

I even spot the helpful man which gives me a pang until I tell myself that I am not interested in men and this man in particular is in thrall to Poppy.

Keith and Mavis are there. Keith looks anxiously at Mavis every few minutes, as if to reassure himself that she is still alive. I manage to restrict my conversation to ‘Isn’t this lovely?’ which surely cannot leave Mavis an opening for a conversation about her ailments. Just in case, though, I move quickly away only to bump into Piers Hackett. I hope he has forgotten about the last time we spoke.

‘I’ve always wanted to dance on a table,’ I say, ‘but I am afraid it is too late.’

He looks somewhat startled and stares at me.
‘Like Napoleon in Moscow. He was too late.’

At this moment Jean comes up. Always the perfect hostess.

‘Are you all right Jessica,’ she says solicitously. ‘You seem to be a bit on edge. You know Piers, don’t you?’

‘Indeed I do, we share an admiration for Napoleon.’

Piers Hackett has instantly brightened up at the mention of Napoleon. Obviously thinking this excuses him from the need to make small talk, he launches into an account of the Treaty of Tilsit. He becomes quite animated and I recover from my anxiety that he will start staring and mumbling and I shall misread him again. It is quite interesting. Such a pity about the trousers. Today they are purple.

We are standing in a corner while I listen to him expound – sometimes I think this is one of my only two experiences with men. One: they talk about something they are interested in and I listen. It was like that with Martin. Two is the Francis Jamieson type who sit in a bored silence while I am compelled to fill the gap with nonsensical chatter, or what we used to call, when I was at school, gay repartee, and am left feeling an idiot. It’s a good job I am reconciled to the single life.

I escape at last from Piers Hackett or rather, Jean saves me by asking him to hand round some canapés. She didn’t know he was rather clumsy but soon found out when he tipped the plate over Mavis. Luckily the canapés were on the dry side and not made of fish, so the damage was not too great even though one fell down the front of her floral blouse. Keith and Jean make quite a good job of cleaning her up.

I had many years of handing plates of food round at my own parties so I don’t offer now. I say ‘my own parties’ but really they were Martin’s parties.

Martin would invite his students for the evening and they would all stand in an admiring circle round him, hanging on his lips as he held forth.

I would creep silently amongst them, smiling vaguely and handing round plates of food, like a temporary waitress from Ring & Brymer the posh caterers.

Occasionally one of them would actually speak to me and once, memorably, someone came into the kitchen and offered to help.

One of these gatherings I remember very well though at the time its significance was lost on me. The visiting speakers from a conference had all been invited for dinner. So too had Lolita, new to the department, plus some specially selected and very deferential students.

Martin often organised conferences. He liked doing this because he could ask famous people whom he admired, not that there were many of those, and forever after claim them as friends.

This time they were all elderly men. One was accompanied by a monolingual Japanese geisha girl who stood behind him at respectful distance and bowed whenever spoken to. Another was a white haired old man with a thirty-something female companion, both wearing what appeared to be His and Her bomber jackets. Then there was the art school lecturer, just about to retire, with one of his students, a Norwegian girl of 19.

One of Martin’s older single female students came muttering into the kitchen where I was hiding, ‘Look at all those blokes. What is it with men?’

I couldn’t answer that.

That was before Lolita, and I wasn’t interested. I was just hoping they would all soon go home. It was however the beginning of the end. If respected cultural icons well into retirement could shack up with much younger women, then so too could Martin.

I did wonder later, after I’d done the washing up, what the attraction could be in a having a live in lover who couldn’t speak the same language. You surely could not spend all your time engaged in sexual congress, being given Japanese massage or little bowls of green tea? Not at age 68 anyway. But that was all in the past.

I turn round with a sigh and find myself facing the helpful man who has been hovering around the edges of the room looking as if he doesn’t know anybody. Knowing that he is not the least bit interested in me but was obviously bowled over by Poppy, I burble on manically, trying to shake off my despondent thoughts, until I seem to drive him away. He leaves the party soon after.

Jean, when I asked her who he was, said ‘Oh, he’s an Actuary. Such a nice man.’

An Actuary? What is that I wonder. It sounds very grand. I must look it up when I get home.

On my way out to the garden later with a plate of salad, I pass two quite posh couples I don’t know at all. I overhear one of the men say to the other, ‘he was eaten you know..’. I long to join in this exciting conversation but I don’t quite know how to break in since they both have their backs to me, so I hover a bit waiting for the other man to utter cries of horror and ask ‘By whom, or what’ and ‘It must have been painful’ but he says nothing, not even ‘How much of him?’

The suspense is unbearable but I dare not intervene too obviously as I have promised Jean I shall behave after I laughed at the sight of the canapé lodged in Mavis’s cleavage.

The rest of the party passed without incident unless you can count Piers Hackett and Francis Jamieson having an argument about sugar production in Napoleonic times and Vivien Ashpole interjecting that you couldn’t get a decent meal anywhere in Paris these days.

That’s the trouble with stand-up buffet parties. You are assailed by snatches of conversation that seem entirely meaningless and you can’t keep switching from group to group asking people what they are talking about. I am awake half the night wondering about the man who was eaten and the relevance of sugar production to meals in Paris today.

19th September. The next morning I am still wrestling with the problem of the man who was eaten. Perhaps I misheard. Perhaps he was beaten? I wonder if they meant in a Cynthia Payne sort of way or an English football team sort of way. Then I suddenly remember what Roland said once about a chap he had met in the way of business. ‘He was Winchester.’ Of course. The man was Eton. A sort of shorthand for he went to the public school of that name and I went to a public school too but not that one. I wonder if I should go round saying ‘I was Codshall Comprehensive’. It doesn’t have quite the same lustre though.

Fran, now to be called Gerda, has a new car to go with her job. I am quite envious. She nips off in the morning and swooshes to a halt outside her house in the evening in quite a dashing manner. None of this pushing a bike up and down like she used to– it’s quite hilly here, nobody actually pedals a bike; they freewheel down hills and otherwise push them - in a noble ecologically correct way, looking down her nose at people in cars.

She has not asked me how I am for weeks. I feel quite neglected.

20th September. The Town has had a visit from Royalty, no less. I would like to say there was tremendous excitement but the visit was kept secret beforehand except from one or two bigwigs and some impromptu local colour. The local colour consisted of the organic butcher, Icarus Jones and his wife. The Prince, for it was he, insisted on going intothe butcher's shop, stayed for half an hour and talked about organic meat and bought some sausages. The butcher's wife was so overcome bythis that she had to retire to the cold store to be revived.

21st September. The phone rings and it is Alex to see how I am after doing my granny bit. I tell him I am going back tomorrow until the weekend. He tells me that Jools is now back living with his parents. He and Sue had an argument and she ran screaming down the road in her nightdress, shouting for the police and yelling rape.

She does seem rather over-excitable I comment.

Jools ran after her and brought her to the ground with a spectacular rugby tackle. They fought for a few minutes, a bout which Sue won because Jools is too gentlemanly to fight a woman in the usual uninhibited Newtown way – this is my interpretation of Alex’s comment that Jools is a ‘big girl’s blouse’ – she then dashes back to the house and locks Jools out.

Jools who is only partially dressed and shoeless spends the rest of the night in the garden shed wrapped in horticultural fleece. When he returned to the house, Sue had taken all his clothes and delivered them to the neighbours, including his best Herbie Frog jacket.

In the early evening I bump into Mavis in the high street. I think she has forgiven me for laughing at the canapé. She is looking very worried. She tells me she has ringing in her ears.

‘I think they’re having bell-ringing practice at St Philips.’ I say.

She is quite cross. ‘I said in my ears, not outside. I even hear it in the night. I am sure its tinnitus.’

‘I don’t think there is a cure for tinnitus,’ I say. ‘I’ll look it up in my book’.

I have got this very good book from my mother. I discovered the other day that rhododendron is very good if your thoughts disappear while they are being put into words. This would be useful for all my friends as most of them have this trouble. We should take it before dinner parties and then we could have a coherent discussion about something, not one punctuated by whosits and whatsisnames and ‘It’ll come back to me in a minute.’ (Which it never does. Only two hours later when you are getting ready to go to bed.)

Of course rhododendron is poisonous, which is a bit of a problem. I don’t know how you get round that. There wouldn’t be much point in remembering the name of the architect of the Scott Memorial or you ex-husband’s aunt who used to hatch out iguana eggs in her bosom, if you were dead.

I tell Mavis, ‘You could try acupuncture’.