Fifty Is Not a Four-Letter Word (10 page)

It’s early, and the place is still almost empty. “Sofia,” he shouts into the ether, “Sofia, it’s Hope. Bring the hummus and
the pita. And a bottle of her favorite retsina from Kourtaki. Be quick.”

“You really shouldn’t treat Sofia like a slave,” I tell him. “Where would you be without her?”

“Without Sofia and her hummus, I would probably still be herding goats. With her, I am a happy man. But with you, I could
go straight to heaven.”

I love the corny stuff that goes on between the two of us and probably between Mario and most of his other female customers.
Sofia puts up with it because it’s good for business and she knows she’s the boss and that Mario would never leave her and
the children. Mario flirting in his restaurant is a corny Rock Hudson comedy meets
Zorba the Greek
.

A supersized Sofia appears looking hot and bothered, carrying the food.

“Good to see you, Hope . . . it has been too long. But only my husband has time to talk. I only have time to work.” With the
inside of her wrist, she flicks back a thick slick of dark, wiry hair from her damp forehead, wipes both hands on her apron,
and stomps back toward the kitchen, her substantial bottom quivering. I tuck straight in. Sofia’s hummus, spiked with charcoal-roasted
red peppers and fresh coriander, makes me see blue. Santorini blue. The bluest blue in the Mediterranean. The wine, which
most of my friends would sneer at, tastes to me like a bracing walk in a pine forest.

I smile. “Delicious. You two do know how to raise a girl’s spirits.”

Maddy walks in, and Mario proceeds to put on a performance as enthusiastic as the one he just entertained me with, only Maddy’s
not quite so responsive. She looks wiped out.

She gives Mario her coat, plonks herself down, slumps her shoulders, and sighs. “Exhausted. Shattered. Completely dead.”

I attempt to pour some retsina into her tumbler, but she places her hand flat above the glass to stop me.

“Oh, I forgot, you hate retsina.”

“No, it’s not that. I’m not drinking.”

“Not drinking? Not possible. I’ll order something you’ll like.”

“No, really, I’ve got a headache. It will only make it worse.”

“Poor Maddy. How about you and me sneaking off to a health farm for a few days? I’m rich at the moment, it will be my treat.”

“I can’t, Hope. We’ve already got two useless locums at the surgery. Max and I are the only ones who know what we’re doing.
It’s chaos as it is without me going off and landing Max in it.”

“But you’d only miss a day or two at the most.”

“It’s out of the question.”

“You do need to think of yourself, Maddy. You’re still grieving, and that business with Ed . . .”

Maddy breaks off a piece of pita and stabs it into the hummus. I bet she’s not seeing Santorini blue. There’s a silence between
us. It happens all the time with me and Jack. With Maddy, it never happens.

• • •

I’m six years older than Maddy, but it doesn’t mean a thing as far as our friendship is concerned. We met on a flight to Venice
in 1983. I was with a bunch of journalists heading off on a press trip; she was going to meet Ruth, an art student who was
spending a term studying Tintoretto, Titian, and the rest of the great Venetian school of painters. Maddy and I hit it off
immediately—I’m a hypochondriac, she’s a doctor, a perfect match. I hate flying, and she talked down my nerves during the
turbulence and advised me not to have a second double whiskey. It also turned out we lived quite close in North London. During
that weekend, I was rounding a corner on some quiet back street, gazing up at a particularly handsome piano nobile, when I
literally bumped right into Maddy again, this time with her sister. We took ourselves off to St. Mark’s and bought outrageously
expensive hot chocolates while the orchestra musicians, in evening dress, serenaded us with arias from Italian operas. As
the pigeons massed appreciatively and the sun settled on the white-limestone-and-pink-marble facade of the doge’s palace and
the tourists walked across wooden planks to avoid getting soaked as the acqua alta rose perilously in the square, I thought:
Lucky me
.

That weekend is etched forever in my memory. I met Maddy, the only person who could begin to substitute for my friend Claire,
who had already emigrated to Australia. I met Jack, too, but that’s another story.

Maddy may have been six years younger than me, but she had already crammed in a lot of living—too much, by most people’s standards.

From early childhood, Maddy had known she wanted to be a doctor. Her path was clear. What she couldn’t have foreseen was that
her parents would die in a car crash when she was twenty and Ruth was seventeen; that she’d marry a man twelve years her senior
when she was just twenty-one; and that at twenty-four, she’d be on the verge of walking out on him. This was the point she
was at when I met her.

When Maddy’s parents died, they left behind a sizable house in the suburbs of Manchester, from the proceeds of which Maddy
was able to buy a flat in London for her and Ruth, which meant that she could continue her studies at UCL and at the same
time keep an eye on her younger sister, who had just won a place to do a foundation course in art at St. Martins. David was
the solicitor Maddy found to look after the conveyancing on the flat. As he was already a junior partner at a law firm, she
felt she could rely on him totally to make sure nothing went wrong while the purchase of the flat was going through. When
the sale was complete, he invited her out to dinner and offered to go through her parents’ papers, which were in a terrible
mess. Over the next few months, he lifted all the burdensome practical problems off her shoulders, freeing her to concentrate
on her studies. He even read and commented on her essays and tested her when she was revising for exams. He was kind to Ruth.
Best of all, he made her feel safe. It lessened the pain, having David around.

When he said, “I want to marry you” she replied, “I want to marry you, too.” Her response was significant, she realized later.
She hadn’t said “I love you.” She’d said “I want to marry you.” Maddy moved into David’s flat, and Ruth moved some art-student
pals into hers.

What Maddy wanted was a security blanket. What David wanted was a wife. Maddy’s studies—and later, her all-night shifts as
she continued her post-graduate medical training—took all her energy. Eighteen months after the small register-office wedding,
David announced that he wanted to have a baby. “But I’m not ready, nowhere near ready,” she told him.

“Look, you don’t need to carry on with this, you know. We should have kids, and later on, when they’re older, you can retrain
for something. This is too much for you. Being a doctor and raising a family just don’t go together, I realize that now. I’m
earning plenty for the two of us. And we ought to start having a proper marriage. We’re not like other couples. We never do
anything together. And we never entertain. It’s time I started bringing my partners—and even some of my clients—back for dinner.
You can’t cook, Maddy. Don’t you think it’s about time you learned? What’s the point of being able to do open-heart surgery
if you can’t boil an egg?”

Maddy felt crushed. David looked at her sternly, without humor, and she was filled with fear.
He’ll leave me. He’ll go off with someone who can’t wait to have babies
. And she thought about the loss of her parents, how it was only her and Ruth now. Children would mean they’d be a proper
family again. Parents and children, as it should be. Not just one lonely, horizontal generation of orphans.

So she carried on with her studies and her clinical practice and threw out her birth-control pills. After six months, she
still wasn’t pregnant.

“You’re not doing this on purpose, are you?” David challenged her one night when her period came.

“What do you mean, on purpose?”

“Using something. Still taking pills.”

“David, you can’t possibly think I’d ever do that to you. Six months isn’t long, it’s normal. If nothing has happened in three
months’ time, we’ll talk again.”

Three months later, Maddy still wasn’t pregnant. Again it was David who brought up the subject.

“I really think you should get yourself checked out,” he said quite harshly.

“You do know they’re going to want to check you out first,” she replied. “They didn’t used to, but now they always check the
man first. Such a simple test, whereas if the problem lies with me, it might take months of investigation.”

“Madeleine, you can be absolutely sure there’s nothing wrong with me.” He’d called her Madeleine when their relationship had
been on a solicitor/client basis. After that first dinner, he’d started to call her Maddy. Now she was Madeleine again. It
made Maddy feel desperately uneasy.

The letter to David from the consultant was to the point: “I regret to inform you that you have a condition called azoospermia.
This means that there is no sperm present in the ejaculate, and therefore you are infertile. There is no treatment for this
condition at present, although current research indicates some possible cause for optimism in the future. I would rather not
predict how many years in the future this might be. If you would like to come and talk to me about assisted reproduction,
please call my secretary to make an appointment.”

“Well, that lets you off the hook,” David said coldly, flinging the letter at her across the table where they were sitting.

“David, you can’t mean that,” she said, shocked, reaching out to touch his hand, which he abruptly pulled away.

That was the beginning of the end. David wouldn’t even discuss it. Wouldn’t talk about adoption or donor insemination or anything
to do with it. He dismissed the idea of going back to the consultant as “a waste of time and money.” He went completely inside
himself. Their sex life came to a halt, and Maddy found pornographic magazines under the bed. She suggested counseling. He
went out drinking and came home crashing into things.

I’m twenty-four,
she thought.
I don’t have to ruin my life just because he’s determined to ruin his
.

That was how things were for Maddy when I met her. Orphaned and on the way to a divorce at twenty-four. An almost doctor with
green eyes, tumbling auburn hair and pale freckled skin, and the kind of small but curvy figure that men—Italian men in particular—couldn’t
resist. Their eyes went out on stalks when Maddy went by. But she couldn’t see it.

Soon after getting back to England, Maddy left David and got on with her life. She hadn’t counted on falling for Ed a few
years later, and Ed falling for Ruth and the two of them getting married and having the twins. But she didn’t begrudge Ruth
her short-lived happiness. Ruth was her little sister, and in any case, Maddy wasn’t the begrudging type.

• • •

I order the kleftiko, as I always do. Maddy orders some chicken kebabs but, after one mouthful, excuses herself from the table
to go to the toilet.

When she comes back, I ask, “Maddy, are you okay? You’ve gone green.”

“Yes, I feel better for having thrown up.”

“It can’t have been the chicken, you’ve only had one bite. Must have caught some beastly bug from one of your beastly patients.”

“What I’ve got you can’t catch.”

“Maddy, don’t do this to me. You’re talking in riddles again, and when you talk in riddles, I know something’s up.”

“The thing is, Hope . . . the thing is, I’m pregnant.”

“You? Pregnant?”

“Yes, little old me.”

“You? At forty-four? Oh my God, I don’t believe it. It’s wonderful. No, I mean it’s terrible. I don’t know what the fuck I
mean. For God’s sake, tell me what I mean . . .”

“Calm down, Hope, Mario’s watching. Shall we start at the beginning?”

“Yes, please.”

“Okay, I’m pregnant. And there’s only one man who could be the father.”

“Not Ed, surely not Ed . . .”

“As I said, there’s only one man who could be the father.”

“Have you told him?”

“You are joking, of course.”

“But you’ve got to tell him. If you’re going to keep it, that is.”

“Keep it? What do you think I’m going to do with it? Flush it down the toilet? I’m forty-four years old, Hope, as you so helpfully
pointed out. Forty-four years old, and this is the first time I’ve been pregnant in my life. I thought it was all over years
ago. I’d resigned myself to never having a baby. I actually thought I was having an early menopause. My periods have been
haywire for months. And now some kind of miracle has taken place. I’m overjoyed. I’m terrified. I think I’m going to be sick
again.”

She’s up and gone once more, leaving me to try to take it in. Maddy having a baby. Having Ed’s baby. Having Ruth’s husband’s
baby. The twins’ aunt providing them with a baby brother or sister. Except they won’t know they have a brother or sister because
Maddy will keep it from them and from Ed, too. Maddy, forty-four, my best friend, having her first baby. Not an elderly primigravida.
A positively ancient primigravida. My best friend having a baby and my own son about to leave home. Why doesn’t anything happen
when it’s supposed to anymore? Why do I feel my life has turned into a soap opera, with shocks, confessions, and cliff-hangers
at every turn?

By the time Maddy gets back, tears are dribbling down my face.

“Hey, Hope. I’m supposed to be the one in a state. What’s with you?”

“I really don’t know. I’m happy and sad and stunned. Just ignore me.” I sniff. “Tell me the plan.”

“There is no plan. The scans so far are fine. I’ll have all the tests, and providing everything goes well, the baby will be
born in October. I shall be a single mother, and you shall have to make yourself useful for a change.”

“And Ed?”

“For Ed, I do have a plan. I’ll tell him when I get to twelve or thirteen weeks. I’ll do it casually, make up something about
this guy I was seeing at the beginning of the year but am no longer seeing. He’s not going to start counting forward from
my last period and putting two and two together. Men don’t think like that. I’ll just say the guy who’s the father has gone
away and that I have no intention of telling him about the baby.”