Fifty Is Not a Four-Letter Word (11 page)

“And are you still in love with Ed?”

“What difference does that make?”

By not answering, Maddy has told me all I need to know.

“So it’s all settled. You really are having a baby.”

“I really am having a baby.”

“And you really want this baby.”

“I really want this baby.”

“And you think you can cope with being a single mother.”

“Not a clue, but I’ve coped with everything else.”

“So shall we have a drink?”

“Anybody there? Drink? Pregnant? I don’t think so.”

“So you really are going to have a baby. Maddy’s going to having a baby.”

“She sure is.”

“Well, I can have a drink, can’t I? I could do with one. Mario,” I squeal, waving and smiling, “a glass of Perrier for me,
please. And make hers a double.” And at last we both burst out laughing.

• • •

My father and I are walking toward the ninth-hole tee together for the start of our half-round of golf, me dragging the trolley
with the clubs, which feels heavier than I remember it. I must be seriously unfit. On the last occasion I did this, I was
seventeen, around the time I started driving lessons. Thirty-three years ago! What had seemed a treat at eleven, at seventeen
had become faintly embarrassing. However much I adored my father, I was too grown up and too busy to spend my precious Saturday
mornings trailing after him around the bloody golf course while he talked business to his friends and ignored me. When I told
him I wouldn’t be coming anymore, he simply said, “Quite right, you’re a big girl now,” which briefly made me wonder whether
he had ever wanted me along in the first place. I’d expected him to put up at least a bit of a fight, that’s how insecure
I was back then. I relied on him for the approval I didn’t get from my mother.

Now I’m back on the same golf course, remembering how I felt when I was eleven, when I was his new caddy, so proud to have
been the person chosen to accompany my father on his early-morning round of golf. Not my mother, not my sister, but me. And
I’m thinking that I don’t just want to remember how it felt to be that little girl, I want to actually be that little girl
again, eleven years old, Daddy’s favorite, if only for the day, the girl whose daddy would always make everything all right.
Life was so much simpler then.

Mummy. Daddy. Is it charming to still call your parents Mummy and Daddy when you’re fifty? Or is it a classic example of infantilism?
I suspect the latter. Sarah doesn’t do this; to her, they’re Mum and Dad. But do you ever grow out of wanting to be approved
of by your parents? I’m not sure you do.

I’m thinking about how Daddy used to get Sarah and me to film him with his Super 8, over and over again, as he practiced his
golf swing in the garden. We’d take turns being cinematographer and director and argue endlessly about the best angles and
light. Around teatime, on the weekends, we’d unroll the foldaway canvas movie screen that we stored in the cupboard under
the stairs, set up the hefty projector on a card table, and fix the fragile rolls of film onto the projector’s spools. We’d
draw the curtains and turn out the lights. Our very own home cinema. Barnet goes to Hollywood. Even our wobbly efforts at
recording our father hitting an imaginary ball seemed Oscar-worthy to us.

If we nagged long enough, he’d let us watch our holiday movies as well, and the films of us when we were younger, jumping
in and out of our little blow-up plastic pool in the garden, splashing each other mercilessly, getting more and more excited
until, inevitably, one of us ended up in tears. Sometimes there’d be a shot of our mother, smiling seductively for the camera,
ice-blond and glamorous in a slightly mussed-up way, wearing a blouse and skirt nipped in at the waist with a wide elastic
belt. But there were never any shots of her joining in with Sarah and me playing.

My father’s swing is still firm and accurate. The ball goes straight down the fairway, although not as far as it used to.
He sets off at a terrific speed. “Come on, girl, stop dawdling.” He grins. His shot is shorter, but his teeth are longer.
“There are people coming up behind us from the eighth.”

From his time in the army in World War II, Abe can still walk at the light infantry pace of 140 steps per minute. Since I’m
the one pulling the trolley, I have to beg him to slow down. “Wait for me, this trolley weighs a ton.”

“Well, you did offer. Want me to take over?”

“No, I do not.”

He slows down and I catch up, a little breathless.

“What are you going to do afterward?”

“Go home to your mother, of course.”

“I don’t mean after this. I mean after . . . after she dies.”

“I’m not going to move into some awful old-age home that smells of wee-wee, that’s for sure.”

“But you can’t live in that big barn all on your own, either. I’d like you to move in with us. Olly’s going on his gap year,
then on to university. There’s the spare room, we’ll do it up, you’ll have your own bathroom.”

“Move in with you, Hope?” He looks genuinely startled. “What on earth are you thinking of? I’m perfectly capable of looking
after myself, and I fully intend to. I haven’t got Alzheimer’s, have I? Unless I’ve forgotten . . .”

He pauses for me to get the joke. I titter obligingly but without real enthusiasm.

“I’ve been teaching myself to cook a bit lately, making soups for your mother, things that are easy for her to get down. After
she’s gone, I’m never going to have a takeaway again. It would be just too . . . sad.”

“Oh, Daddy . . .” I go to embrace him.

“Not here, sweetheart. Not on the golf course. The foursome behind are already snapping at our heels. I think I’ll take a
chance on a three iron.”

I give him the club and wait quietly while he takes the shot.

“Damn, I’ve sliced it.”

“Sorry, Daddy, I didn’t mean to upset you. But when else are we going to get to talk?”

“It’s okay, Hope. I just hate to see your mother suffering like this. And I shall miss her so much when she’s gone.”

“I know you will.”
Will I?
I wonder.

“Fifty-five years. Almost every day for fifty-five years, we’ve been together.”

We’re quiet for a moment while we head off toward the rough. We go through the club-passing ritual again; this time the shot
is good.

“Hope, by the time you get to my age, you’ve seen a lot of people die. And I lived through the war, remember, so death’s hardly
a surprise. But I should have gone first; I never expected it to be this way around.”

“You know I’ll worry if you’re on your own.”

“If you insist on worrying, Hope, why don’t you worry about your mother for a change? Or at least try to forget your perceived
slights and gripes and show a bit of compassion.”

I feel I’ve been hit in the face by a stray golf ball. This isn’t how he talks to me. Not ever.

“But—”

“Hope, I know you’ve got this ridiculous idea that your mother never loved you, but she did. In her way. Think how frustrated
she must have been. She had so many talents, musical, artistic, but she didn’t know how to channel them. She married young
and straightaway had Sarah and then you. And I didn’t particularly encourage her in her endeavors. I just thought as long
as I brought home the money, provided a nice house and pretty clothes and holidays, she’d be happy. I probably stifled her,
even though I didn’t mean to.”

“But she adores you. Always did.”

“Yes, because I rescued her from her life as a Harrods shopgirl. I think she thinks I saved her, and she never forgot it.
But I do feel that had she been born twenty years later, around the time you were, she would have made something of herself.
Become a something. Like you have done.”

The foursome behind us are shouting now. We can’t hear them, but we can imagine what they’re saying.

My dad takes another shot. It lands on the green, close to the hole.

“Good one, Pops.” My tone is falsely light.

“Haven’t completely lost my touch, have I?” he says, as if cross words have never passed his lips. “Don’t need to be locked
up in the old folks’ home just yet.”

We’ve never talked about my mother in this way before. I’m still smarting from his surprise attack. It’s been an unspoken
agreement that I don’t bleat about her to him. It wasn’t even me who brought the subject up. There never would have been any
point in me complaining about my mother openly, because, like now, he most certainly would have leaped to her defense. But
while I was growing up, I never blamed him for his failure to criticize her; I blamed my mother for manipulating him and holding
sway over him. I can see now it was something of a weakness on his part. A little chink in his heroic armor. Maybe not quite
perfect after all.

We’re not going to get any further down this particular path today. And neither do I want to spoil this precious time together.
Daddy won’t be coming to live with us, and that’s that. Which is probably just as well, as I suddenly realize I haven’t even
consulted Jack on the subject.

The early-morning haze has dispersed.

“Twenty-first of March,” my father says. “The first day of spring.”

We walk on, companionably now. It’s not possible to remain entirely unaffected by this season of rebirth, the daffodils fanning
out under the oak trees, the first buds. I think of Maddy and her baby. A seven-spot ladybird lands on my left-hand knuckle,
a sure sign of spring come early. For a while we’re each suspended in our own thought bubble.

“Are you all right for money?” my father asks out of the blue. I sigh with relief. We’re back on safe ground. “I don’t know
what physiotherapists earn these days.”

“We’re fine, Daddy, just fine. I got a year’s money, remember. And if we do run out before I get myself a job, we’ll just
move in with you and rent our house out to pay the bills.”

“Over my dead body,” he says, potting a long putt with a satisfied smirk.

• • •

My parents’ house isn’t at all what you’d expect. It’s not one of those stone-clad retirement bungalows with lots of modern
conveniences and a taste bypass. It’s a stunning eighteenth-century converted barn filled with twentieth-century art and sculpture,
stone floors covered with colorful rugs bought on holidays in Mexico and Peru, African wood carvings, and one-off pieces of
furniture by Le Corbusier and Eileen Gray.

My mother had a Frank Lloyd Wright moment after Sarah and I had both left home. She discovered “organic architecture” on a
trip to Arizona, where she visited Wright’s architectural commune at Taliesin West. When she got back to England, it was curtains
for the run-of-the-mill suburban house where we grew up. Her new project was to find a unique home for her and Abe and furnish
it in a way that would, in the great architect’s words, “promote harmony between man and nature, create a unified whole.”
If this search for a unified whole—in which building, furnishings, and surroundings would integrate seamlessly with one another—required
swapping a set of well-upholstered dining chairs for two stone benches that gave you a sore bottom, it was a small price to
pay for aesthetic harmony.

Even our old house in the suburbs had been quite avant-garde as they go. My mother’s taste was always different from that
of other mothers—just as she didn’t dress from Jaeger or John Lewis, preferring shops like Granny Takes a Trip or designers
like Ossie Clark, she never went in for moquette or swirly carpets, favoring wooden floors and clean lines long before Habitat
flagged up the concept of contemporary design. Chintz was ever always a dirty word in the Lyndhurst household.

At the time I was rather partial to swirly carpets. At my friends’ houses, I would sit on the stairs and trace the patterns
with my eye with such determined concentration that I’d forget where I was for minutes at a time, until I was dragged off
to play hula hoops or jacks or Monopoly or whatever game was the current craze.

There was a cocooning quality to swirly carpets that our house lacked. Looking back, I can see how those comforting swirls
were something of a metaphor for the overall sense of welcome I felt in my friends’ houses, where mothers seemed more interested
in their children’s day at school than in the way light fell on a vase or the perfect shade of oyster for the architraves.

In the absence of other work, my mother has put real passion into her housing projects. Frankie’s Barn, as the family dubbed
the home where my parents have lived for over twenty-five years now, has been her magnum opus. It has appeared in dozens of
interiors magazines over the years, both here and in the U.S. and the rest of Europe—even in
Exquisite Interiors
. It’s a great source of pride for both my parents. And it’s remarkable, truly remarkable. I do not love it, cannot love it.
But it’s no wonder my father could never bear to give this up, I think as I enter the vast living area with its terra-cotta
floors and huge central fireplace, lit and glowing, and its twelve-foot-high windows overlooking the benign Hertfordshire
hills.

“I’m off then, Jenny, my love,” says my father almost the moment I arrive. “If you need me, I’ll be on the mobile.” He leans
over the sofa, where she’s sitting with her legs up and her back against the plumped-up ethnic cushions, to kiss her tenderly
on the lips.

I look at my father’s back as he exits through the front door, willing him to turn round and decide to stay, even though it
was me who set this whole thing up in the first place. It’s the two of us now. Just me and my mother.

“Can I get you anything?” I ask her.

“Some camomile tea would be nice.”

The kitchen is in the corner, solid wood and simple Shaker style. I go to switch on the kettle, playing for time as I get
out the cups and the tea bags, busying myself unnecessarily, searching for a tray and biscuits. I barely take breath between
biscuits these days.

“No biscuits for me, they just get stuck,” calls my mother, the words catching in her throat. “And it might be a good idea
if you don’t have any, either. Has Jack said anything about your weight since you’ve stopped work?”