Fifty Is Not a Four-Letter Word (2 page)

But I think it went deeper than that, this agreeing to a party that I didn’t really want. I’m hardly the doormat type, so
usually, when I say no, I mean it. The weird thing is, I’m not sure what I want anymore. Over these past few months, I’ve
been suffering from a kind of mental vertigo. A sense of spinning, of disequilibrium, but entirely in the mind.

Take the business of confidence, for example. I spent the first thirty years of my life trying to acquire some confidence.
Feeling the fear and doing it anyway
. Taking courses to learn how to be assertive. Forcing myself to walk into crowded rooms alone without running straight out
again. I spent the next almost twenty years enjoying that hard-won self-assurance. And now? Gone. Kaput. Like I’m the victim
of a smash-and-grab attack. How on earth did this happen? If I’m being truthful, I can’t even decide in the morning what to
wear for work or what to cook for dinner. As for my job, my precious career, I keep wondering if I’m good enough. And if I
even care that much anymore. Can I blame it all on the big 5-0?

“Officer,” I want to shout at every passing policeman. “I’ve been robbed.”

“Sorry to hear that, ma’am,” I imagine the reply. “What did they take?”

“Just my confidence, Officer. Probably not very valuable, as far as you’re concerned. But it meant a lot to me.”

At least I still had the wherewithal to insist on conditions. I refused to allow any mention of the birthday on the invites,
knowing all along it was a hopeless cause and Jack was bound to be briefing everyone behind the scenes. But I did make him
promise no speeches, no cake, no male strippergrams. And he’s a man of his word.

“Jack, why are
you
so keen to have a party?”

“I think it will do you good. Remind you that life’s for living. You haven’t been yourself for months.”

Exactly. Jack got it in one. I’ve forgotten who myself is.

“You’re right, my love. If we’re going to do it, let’s pull out all the stops and make it the best party ever,” I said. “After
all, it’s the only . . . the only”—I was going to say the only fiftieth birthday I would ever have, but the words wouldn’t
come out—“the only New Year’s Eve party we’re likely to have for some time,” I finished feebly.

“Champagne,” said Jack, saving me.

“Laurent-Perrier pink champagne,” I countered, perking up a bit.

“Martinis,” Jack added. “With olives.”

“Cosmopolitans for the girls,” I suggested, practicing a pout but sounding more like Peggy Mitchell from the Square than Samantha
on
Sex and the City
. Still, I was getting into the swing of it.

“Mojitos,” interjected a gravelly voice entering the kitchen. “I’ll do the cocktails. And if it means free booze, James and
Ravi will probably help, too. Just so long as when things get really gross—like by the time the hall is clogged up with walkers—you
don’t mind us saying good night to the corpses and moving on.”

Olly loped over and around me, wrapping me from behind in his skinny arms and planting a big smacker of a kiss on the side
of my neck. My darling boy. Seventeen years old and six feet to my five feet seven (unless I’ve shrunk a bit lately, which
isn’t beyond the realm of possibility). He’s still capable of unsolicited hugs and affection when I’m not annoying the hell
out of him, which, according to Olly, is most of the time.

“Mmm, talking of Ravi,” I mused, “I feel a theme coming on. There’s certainly not enough room in the house, so we’ll need
a tent. A tent with heaters. Otherwise we’ll all freeze to death. Although, come to think of it, preserving our increasingly
ancient friends in a cryology experiment might not be such a bad idea.”

“Yeah, absolutely fascinating, but what’s cryology, and what’s all this got to do with Ravi?”

“Well, what I really fancy is a cross between a Moroccan souk and
Monsoon Wedding
. I can picture it. The whole tent lined with beautiful jewel-toned fabrics, like something out of
The Arabian Nights
. . .”

“Look, I don’t want to be rude or anything, but I’ve places to go, people to see. Do you think you could get to the point?”

“I was only wondering if Ravi’s mum might know where to get cheap sari material.”

“Muuum!” Olly changes moods as easily as flicking a light switch. “I do NOT, do you hear, NOT, want you ringing Ravi’s mum.”

“But I thought I might invite her to the party.”

“You hardly know her, for fuck’s sake!”

“Olly, language check.” Jack speaking.

“
She
swears all the time. What do you call it, Dad? Swearing like a trooper? You guys are such hypocrites. And don’t you have
enough friends already without getting together with my mates’ mums all the time? It’s so creepy. I know you sit around yabbering
about us, trying to gather information to use against us.”

My eyes fixed on the impressive array of buffed and sharpened kitchen knives that dangle from the magnetic metal strip behind
the cooker. Did Medea commit infanticide with a pointy knife? Or was it a blunt instrument?

“Forget it, Olly.” I was trying desperately not to lose it. “I’ll sort it on my own. Forget I even mentioned it.”

“Anything to eat?” asked the boy, flicking the switch again. “I’m starved . . . Shit, I’ve just realized something. You’re
going to be fifty, aren’t you? Fifty! That’s what this party is really all about. We’re going to have to all club together
and buy you a face-lift. Last night James and I were watching this hilarious program,
Makeover Mayhem
or something. Apparently, it’s what every fifty-year-old wants. A new face. How much do these things cost, anyway? Can you
afford it? Will I still get to go on my gap year? You did promise you’d pay half. Will you look surprised all the time, like
Anne Robinson?”

“And start telling me that I’m the weakest link?” added Jack, sounding somewhat rueful.

I kicked Olly playfully in the shins, but when he screeched, “Ow, that really hurt,” in a way that suggested it really did
hurt, I found myself smiling.

• • •

My being born on January 1 is a mixed blessing, depending on whom you’re talking to. My mother, for example, says New Year’s
Eve is her worst day of the year, because when everyone else is celebrating, she is reliving the nightmare of giving birth
to me. If you were to go to a party on New Year’s Eve where my mother happened to be, you’d spot her straight off: She’d be
loudly and aggressively subjecting anyone within earshot to the story of my undignified entry into the world. Later, she’d
be the one curled up in a fetal position in the corner, swigging gin straight from the bottle, getting more maudlin by the
minute. You can imagine why relations between me and my mother sometimes tend toward the frosty. This year, to my relief,
she and Dad are going to South Africa for Christmas and staying for the New Year, so at least we’re spared her presence. My
father’s presence, by contrast, is always pure pleasure. He’s the longest-suffering and cheeriest person I’ve ever met. He
still adores her and what he chivalrously refers to as her “engaging eccentricity.” Even after fifty-five years of marriage.
I don’t get it, but neither would I dare to question it. It’s not my business.

• • •

After twenty-seven hours in labor, by ten p.m. on December 31, 1952, Jenny Lyndhurst wasn’t the slightest bit interested in
the symbolic nature of the date. She didn’t give a damn whether her offspring arrived before midnight, as the clock struck
twelve, or never. The midwife, who’d been hoping to get off her shift at ten
P.M.
in order to join a group of nurses and doctors for the countdown on the hospital roof, with its panoramic views of the Thames,
could barely loosen my mother’s viselike grip on her arm.

“You can’t leave me, not now,” my mother wailed. “I’m going to die if this isn’t over soon.”

Mary, the midwife, who was caring and Catholic and Irish, didn’t have the heart to abandon my belligerent, albeit distressed,
mother. As Big Ben began to ring out for midnight, Mary exclaimed, “You’re ten centimeters dilated! We’ll soon be there, Mrs.
Lyndhurst. It’s time to push; start pushing, Mrs. Lyndhurst. We’re nearly there.”

An hour later, Mrs. Lyndhurst was still pushing and still wailing and still ranting between wails about how she’d never wanted
to have a second child and how Abe, my soon-to-be father, was to blame, and how she was going to have her tubes tied the minute
the baby was out, and how all midwives were sadists. Not that any of it mattered, she insisted, because she was about to die
anyway.

By this time the doctor had arrived—from the roof, presumably—wearing a silly paper hat on his head and streamers around his
neck.

“Get out of here,” Mrs. Lyndhurst screamed. “Mary, the alarm, get this intruder out of here.”

“Calm down, Mrs. Lyndhurst, and let me have a look,” said the duty obstetrician. “Do we want to get this baby out now or not?”
He bent down to look closer between my mother’s writhing, ricocheting legs, jerking his head back, then forward, then back
again to avoid being hit in the face by a flailing limb.

At the very moment he was thinking of forceps, Jenny Lyndhurst felt something rip her flesh apart. She let out a low, guttural
groan that sounded nothing like the noise a human being makes. The crown broke through, and a bloody, big-headed baby slithered
out of her, caught in time by the triumphant doctor. He beamed, as though he and he alone had been responsible for the successful
outcome.

“A beautiful baby girl, Mrs. Lyndhurst. My sincerest congratulations. One of the first babies of the new year, born midway
through the twentieth century, at the dawning of a new era of peace and prosperity. What a blessing.”

If she’d had the strength, my mother would have strangled the patronizing popinjay. Instead, she snapped breathlessly, “Cut
the sermon, Doctor. I’d like to see my baby, if it’s all right with you.” As I was lifted and placed on her belly, a wrung-out,
torn-asunder Jenny Lyndhurst relented a little. “In the spirit of the good doctor’s words, I name you Hope. As in Hope for
the future. As in Hope that I never, ever have to go through this again.”

At which point my father, who’d been pacing and intermittently peeking around the curtain for what seemed like days, walked
in clutching the hand of a sleepy, confused, curly-haired two-and-a-half-year-old in a smocked dress and patent-leather shoes
and with a big ribbon at the side of her head. My sister, Sarah. She, in turn, was clutching a one-eyed teddy bear. Before
my father could say a word, my mother was off. “You’ve no idea what I’ve been through. And I told you not to bring her. This
is no place for a child. Why isn’t she at her grandmother’s?”

“My poor darling, you must be quite exhausted,” he replied, refusing to be riled. “But look at the little mite, she’s perfect.
Look, Sarah, your lovely little sister.” Sarah took one look at me—still attached to the umbilical cord, still smeared with
slime—and began to scream.

“Congratulations, Mr. Lyndhurst, but you’re a little premature,” said Mary sternly. “All is well. But it’s nearly three o’clock
in the morning, and Sarah should be in bed. According to hospital rules, you shouldn’t be here at all, and certainly not with
your daughter. It disturbs the other patients at this time of night. There’s clearing up to do. And then Mrs. Lyndhurst and
baby Hope need some sleep. So please go home and come back in the morning.”

“Hope? I never . . . Oh, never mind. Hope, that’s the prettiest name I ever heard. Next to Sarah, that is.”

Sarah’s head was buried in my father’s overcoat. “Baby horrid. Mummy horrid,” she sobbed. “Daddy and Sarah go home.”

My dad smiled on regardless. He says he fell in love with both of us girls from the first second he saw us. I’ve never once
had reason to doubt him.

• • •

Unlike my mother, I revel in having been born on January 1 around halfway through the twentieth century. It kind of puts me
in the thick of things, gives my birthday an extra significance, a bit of historical context, as my dad would say. Okay, this
year it has a significance I could have done without, but as a rule, it has worked in my favor. Mostly, I’ve chimed rather
well with the decades. As I came in, rationing was about to go out, and by the time Harold Macmillan, in 1957, told Britons
that they’d “never had it so good,” that was true of my family. I managed to squeeze in about five minutes of swinging at
the end of the ’60s; I marched to a faint-hearted feminist tune in the ’70s; in the ’80s I became a working mum and soared
to the peak of my profession, although I never voted for Margaret Thatcher; and in the ’90s . . . what did I do in the ’90s?
I just carried on doing what I’d done in the ’80s, minus the shoulder pads. Oh, and I took up yoga, to which I was totally
unsuited, because my head steadfastly refuses to unclutter even when I’m asleep. My fight-or-flight mechanism is on constant
red alert. I’m not even sure I see the point of relaxing. It’s
not
doing stuff that makes me anxious. Lying on a mat with someone else’s feet too close to my nose, trying to imagine the gentle
swish of waves beside the seashore, makes my breathing go all funny—fast and short and shallow, instead of slow and deep and
regular.

It seems to me that I’ve gone from zero to fifty in about the same time as it takes a Ferrari Testarossa. One second I was
slithering out from between my ill-tempered mother’s legs, the next, whoosh, here I am weighing up whether to bleach or laser
my incipient mustache. I don’t care what those inane glossy magazines tell you—oops, I nearly neglected to mention that I
am editor in chief of one of those very same glossy magazines—but fifty is not fabulous, it’s not fun, and it definitely isn’t
funny.

I do love giving parties, though, and I would have been thrilled to be giving one on New Year’s Eve if not for the F-word.

Jack and I sat down to do the invites under various headings. First, Family.

“That’s easy,” said Jack, “what with my parents both being dead and yours on holiday in Cape Town.” I ignored him and wrote
down my sister, Sarah, her husband, William, and their three girls, Jessie, Amanda, and Sam.