The Coming of Age. February Part 1.

I have always longed to go skiing and now the opportunity is about to come my way. Sarah has offered to pay for me to join Alex, younger daughter Harriet and her husband Russell on a week’s ski-ing holiday in Austria towards the end of the month. I am having an exciting life I repeat to myself. My affirmations really work.
I have to get fit very quickly. I wish I had gone swimming last month as per my Resolution. Then I realised that I had decided not to make that one. I decide to enrol at pre-ski class at local gym.
I turn up at 5.30 to my first pre-ski class. Everybody else has been going at it since early January. There is one over-30 year old in the class – me. I am dressed in baggy navy tracksuit bottoms and a loose greyish-white T-shirt. Everyone else is in designer lycra in eyeball singeing purple, peacock and orange. I am fascinated by these as I lurk at the back of the group. Shiny round buttocks are outlined by contrasting leotards which stop at the waist at the back except for a stringy bit which goes between the legs and attaches to the front. Only two or three of the young women look really good from the back in this challenging outfit.
I thought young women were supposed to go round asking ‘Does my bum look big in this?’ all the time. Someone said this on a quiz programme the other day and everybody laughed a lot. Pre-skiers obviously scorn such a question, or if they ask it, take no cognisance of the answer. From the back many look like a lot of bobbing beach balls. I just look a mess but at least my behind doesn’t look big, well not specially. Not more so than usual.
I soon get my comeuppance when we start to move and they jump up and down and dash from corner to corner doing ten push ups followed by ten step movements onto a plastic box turned upside down. After ten minutes I am out of breath and my knees have ceased to quietly moan and have taken to shrieking. Even the owner of the biggest pair of buttocks, which look like watermelons as they are encased in dark green lycra, is still jumping up and down on her plastic box. Ten minutes later I quietly slip away. No one notices as the instructor is yelling ‘One, two, one, two, stop, change, one, two’ at the top of her voice to try and be heard over the noise from a tape recorder that is pulsing in the background. My ears are ringing.
The next day I cannot move without pain. Ring Harriet in a panic. There is only a fortnight or so to go.
‘Never mind,’ says Harriet. ‘There will be tobogganing, cross country ski-ing, lovely walks and a jolly night life.’

I am sure my affirmations are working. I am having an exciting life. First the ski-ing holiday and now Julia has asked me to go as a guest to the Historical Society’s AGM. It is followed by Wine and Cheese (free) and a talk by Piers Hackett. He is writing the 106th life of Napoleon. Or is the 107th? There are quite a lot. I have never heard Piers Hackett lecture or indeed say much at all. Martin would never go to lectures unless he was the lecturer, which made it rather déjà vu for me. Now I go to anything I want to.
What shall I wear? I try on everything in my wardrobe and end up wearing what I started with, a jacket, shirt and some smartish trousers. Oh, well, my mother always said, and still does say, now I come to think of it, that nobody is going to be looking at me.
The AGM part was rather dull. I just avoided being co-opted on to the committee by Julia who had to intervene and tell the chairman I was only a guest. I was just making a casual little arm movement to my doctor, the heavenly Dr Houseman whom I had noticed on the other side of the room. He probably has no idea who I am. Anyway, this arm movement was misinterpreted as a desire to offer myself for treasurer. I should have remembered; AGMs are like being at an auction sale. All voluntary societies are desperate to find secretaries and treasurers and will seize anybody, on the smallest pretext, as long as they are not actually dead. From then on, I kept my eyes fixed on the ground and tried not to twitch.
I have several glasses of wine and am laughing gaily with Julia and two of her bridge-playing friends when Piers Hackett comes up. I give him my best smile and say ‘I am so looking forward to your talk.’ He blinks a bit, mumbles and keeps staring at me. Oh God, my lipstick’s all over my teeth. I am laughing too much. Martin used to hate me laughing a lot.
‘Saw your husband, told him he was foolish.’
Julia and her friends look startled and back away, leaving us together.
‘I am so glad we agree,’ I say. ‘I am sure we’ll find more to agree about after your talk.’
He continues to stare at me. I try to appear dignified but I had spent so long deciding what to wear that I had had no supper and the wine, a cheap and powerful red, as it so often is on these occasions, has gone to my head. I must be looking like a maniac. Perhaps my mascara is running down my face? I remember, worriedly, that I am not wearing any.
Luckily it is time for Piers Hackett to give his talk. He is coherent and voluble surprisingly after his speechlessness at my dinner party. He has come across some documents that prove that Marshal de Grouchy was bribed by the British Ambassador in Paris not to join Napoleon and thus, Napoleon was beaten by the allies at Waterloo. He is a great admirer of Napoleon and feels sure that Napoleon would have won and the course of history would have been very different if we had not been so dastardly as to bribe de Grouchy. The talk was very well received. The Chairman said that we in our small town had been privileged to hear about this ground-breaking research before anyone else. He was overcome with the excitement of it all.
‘It will make the headlines and we heard it first here.’
Piers Hackett looks modestly pleased with the vote of thanks and we all stand up and there is milling around. He is immediately accosted by Vera Buddle who thinks she is a cut above the rest of us because she had eight children, two of whom became doctors and one married a doctor, Dr Houseman no less. She goes to every talk in the town and always engages the speaker in conversation afterwards. No-one else gets a look in. She never wants to know anything but only to tell them about her experience with the subject in question. I know because I once stood behind her, hoping to talk to a speaker who had just given an interesting talk on Viking Burial Ships and she was telling him about her husband’s desire to be interred in an ecologically sound manner in his old wheelbarrow and wasn’t this the same impulse. He had been a keen gardener.
What she can be talking about today I do not know, perhaps her husband was related to Josephine or was once bribed to prescribe some medicine to our MP which subsequently changed the course of history? Anyway this gives me an opportunity to slip out and find the Ladies, just to check if I really do look unusually odd. Julia said I looked much as usual but I didn’t believe her. Like many of my contemporaries, she refuses to wear her glasses in public. Piers Hackett stares at me again but that could be in desperation about Vera Buddle. There is no mirror in the Ladies so I return and signal to Julia that I’d like to go. I inadvertently catch Piers Hackett’s eye, and wave.
‘Wonderful talk. I am so glad we agree about Napoleon.’
I have just arrived home, rather unsteadily, when the telephone rings. One of the children, probably Alex who keeps late hours. But no, it is Piers Hackett. Once I have said ‘Hello’ my conversational sang froid deserts me.
‘We get on so well’, he mumbles, ‘Agree about everything.’
I am struck dumb.
He mumbles on, ‘Foolish husband…splendid woman. Always thought … splendid…good cook, excellent …’
‘I am very honoured,’ I say firmly, ‘but I must tell you I am probably old enough to be your mother.’
‘Always loved my mother’, he mumbles.
It is very odd about lecturers. They sound fluent on a platform talking about their chosen subject but become totally incoherent when speaking to you personally. I have noticed it many times.
‘It’s very kind of you,’ I say, thinking fast, ‘but since Martin left, well I haven’t really got over it and I don’t feel I want to make another relationship. I hope you will understand.’ I pause briefly, say ‘Thank you again for your interesting talk.’ and put the phone down.
I handled that very well I thought, considering. I retire to bed still a little groggy.
Then an awful thought, like cold steel, penetrates my consciousness. I am wide awake. What was it he actually said? He didn’t ask me out, offer me his body or even a copy of one of his books Perhaps he simply rang to see if I would do some typing for him because he thought I might need some extra money (True). I go hot and cold and cannot sleep all night in spite of affirming constantly.
I will have to go to the shops in a completely different way to avoid going past his house. The options for walking into town to the shops are getting fewer, I have so many people to avoid. Soon I shall have to hang glide from my roof to the supermarket forecourt. Even then I’d probably be accosted by Vera Buddle as I came in to land.