Fifty Is Not a Four-Letter Word (29 page)

“How
dare
you call me bad, you bitch,” says the young woman, who is trembling with rage and looks as though she is about to attack
me.

“No, not you, the dog. The
dog
!” I can’t help myself, I start to laugh. “I am
so
sorry,” I splutter. “It must have been the croissant. And every time you raised your arm to escape her, she must have thought
you were playing and wanted her to jump up and catch it. I can see,” I say, cracking up again, “I can see from that paper
bag you’re carrying that it came from Maison Blanc—they’re her favorite.” I deliver one of my spontaneous signature snorts.

“So it’s my fault, is it, for having the cheek to eat a croissant on public land? And now you’re making a joke of it. It’s
not funny. You stupid, dried-up old cows and your bloody dogs. I hate the lot of you.”

She has a right to be angry, this sour-faced young woman, but she’s in danger of going too far.

“Just look. My brand-new Jigsaw skirt, it’s ruined. Ninety quid it cost me, and it’s the first time I’ve worn it. I’m on my
way to a meeting at South End Green. This was supposed to be a shortcut. How the hell am I supposed to go to a meeting looking
like this?”

I examine her skirt, which isn’t in nearly as bad a state as she thinks it is. Two small brown paw prints—which will easily
brush off, as we’ve not had rain for a week and the ground is almost parched—and a half-inch tear. I refrain from saying any
of this. Jigsaw woman looks about to pounce.

“I don’t know what to say,” I say, trying to keep a straight face. “She’s usually so well behaved, but I was talking and I
was distracted, and she’s still a puppy, and I clearly have a lot more training to do. Here, I’ll write down my details, and
you can get in touch and tell me what I owe you. I’m sorry, I really am.” I pull a pencil from my backpack and write my name,
address, and telephone number on the Maison Blanc paper bag.

“I’ll be getting in touch, all right. That dog of yours should be put down.” Croissant woman marches off, not looking where
she’s going and stabbing dementedly at her mobile phone. I rather hope she walks into a tree.

I call Susanna. She’s finished her croissant and trots happily toward me.

“Now
sit
,” I say sternly, and she does as I attach the lead to her collar. “You’re staying attached to this until you learn to behave
yourself, young lady.”

Nick has been watching the proceedings from a safe distance. Now he walks over to join me. “Two comic turns so far, and it’s
only a quarter past nine in the morning. I thought it was best not to interfere. Are you okay?”

“Yes, but I didn’t help my case by laughing. And Susanna did tear the woman’s skirt. I’d have been just as furious if the
positions had been reversed.”

Nick reaches out and touches my shoulder. “I got my timing all wrong, didn’t I? I should have thought more carefully about
the implications of what I just said to you.”

“There’s really no need to apologize,” I say, although I rather wish Nick had kept his suspicions to himself, at least until
such time as he had some evidence. “I don’t think there was ever going to be a good time for what just passed between us.”

“I’m sorry, Hope, I really am, it could be my imagination.” Nick looks shrunken, smaller than I remember him.

“Ouch!” A stabbing pain in my stomach, right above my belly button, startles me.

“Are you really okay?”

“Yes, just a funny pain. Out of the blue. From nowhere. It’s probably a stress response. I feel a bit shaky, Nick,” I say.
“Would you mind if we cut the rest of the walk and went straight to Kenwood House so we can talk about this sitting down,
over a coffee?”

• • •

“You’ve not even met Jack, have you?” I say as Nick comes out from the café bearing two coffees and draws up a chair next
to me in what, under other circumstances, would be the perfect al fresco late-summer setting. I’m trying to ignore the pain
in my stomach.

“Not met Jack, are you kidding? He’s over practically all the time. Sally insists on inviting him round—three times last week!
She says he must be lonely on his own and that she owes him so much for curing her back and shoulder. Don’t get me wrong,
he’s a really decent guy, but three times in a week!”

How am I supposed to respond? Jack to dinner three times in a week? I feel on the verge of one of my counterproductive rants,
but the pain in my stomach is containing me, slowing me down. I’m shaken by my encounter with croissant woman—making a joke
of it was just a smoke screen; I often start cracking inappropriate jokes when I’m nervous. And now I have to try to focus
on the possibility of a new drama in my life. I had no idea how cozy Sally and Jack had become. Is that what she meant the
night of the committee meeting when she thanked me for Jack? Surely not.

Should I suggest to Nick that if Sally really were having an affair, she wouldn’t be quite so blatant about it? Or that Jack’s
such an honorable man, even if he were to have an affair with another man’s wife, he’d never be so unkind as to flaunt it
in the man’s face? But maybe I have no real idea of what Sally or even Jack is capable of. I didn’t know what I was capable
of until I did it in Paris and nearly did it again in Covent Garden. I could say how hurt I feel that Sally hasn’t thought
about me or even invited me once for dinner, despite the work I’m doing free of charge for the charity and despite the possibility
that I might be lonely, too. But pointing out the contradiction in Sally’s behavior would make the “affair” between Sally
and Jack seem even more likely in Nick’s eyes.

So I decide to say none of these things. Instead, I ask, “How are things between you and Sally?”

“Not so healthy,” he replies.

“And what do you mean by that?” The pain in my stomach is really beginning to bother me.

“What glues us together is the memory of Cat, our determination to create this memorial to her short life. For Sally, it’s
bordering on obsession. Without the charity, I think she—we—would fall apart. Plenty of couples break up in these circumstances.
One wants to talk about the loss, the other can cope only by not talking about it at all. But it’s not like that for Sally
and me. We talk of little else. That’s what I mean by unhealthy. Our life is everything about Cat and nothing about us.”

“Don’t answer if you think I’m being intrusive, but why didn’t you have more children?”

“It’s no secret. Sally couldn’t bear the possibility of it happening again. She wouldn’t have another child because she was
so very fearful of losing it. It was her decision, not mine.”

“But you both always seem so relentlessly optimistic and upbeat. I am always so inspired by Sally’s sunny outlook. And by
yours, too.”

“Yeah, Oscars for both of us.”

“Oh, Nick. I really don’t know. I think perhaps Sally’s just being kind. I really hope she is, for both our sakes.” I’ve been
thinking about this quite dispassionately, trying to look at it from Nick’s position. It’s only beginning to dawn on me that
if Nick is right, and Sally and Jack are having an affair, maybe Sally is the real reason Jack left me. And if that is the
case, then Jack and I are really finished. A picture comes into my head of the two of them in a candlelit restaurant, Sally
opening her heart to Jack, Jack looking at the beautiful, proud, brave, tragic Sally and finding himself falling for her.
So different in her elegant and vulnerable blondeness from dark-haired, klutzy, neurotic me.

“Have you thought about confronting her?” I ask.

“I already did. She said it was the craziest accusation she’d ever heard. Would you confront Jack about it?”

“Nick, I need to think about this, but right now all I can think about is this pain in my stomach, which is getting worse.
I may have to go home and take something for it.”

“And you thought we were going to have a pleasant stroll and a chat,” says Nick, sounding weary and defeated.

“Yes, Nick.” I smile weakly. “You’ve ruined my day and given me a pain in the gut. And shouldn’t you be at work by now?”

“My God, the time,” says Nick, looking at his watch and getting up from his chair. He blows me a kiss, promises to call later
to make sure I’m all right, and is gone.

I head for the car park, not able to quite straighten up because of the nagging pain. Susanna is pulling on the lead, trying
to make me go faster than I can. It must be something I’ve eaten or some kind of bug. Whatever it is, it’s getting worse.
And somehow I don’t think Jack is the cause.

• • •

By the time Maddy turns up to see me at nine p.m., after a late night at work, I am crying from the pain. She feels my stomach,
which is hard and has blown up like a balloon.

“Either you’re trying to steal my thunder,” says Maddy, “or you have some kind of blockage. We need to get you to the hospital,
and we need to get you there fast.”

“But surely—”

“There is no surely about it,” she says, waddling around my bedroom and into the bathroom to gather up whatever I might need
for an overnight stay. “Here,” she says, flinging me a pair of sweatpants, a T-shirt, and a sweater. “Get these on. I’d call
an ambulance, but as the car’s right outside, I can probably get you there faster.”

• • •

I’m a complex web of postoperative tubes and wires. There’s the epidural in my back, still feeding anesthetic into the nerve
routes from the spinal cord and blocking the pain. There’s the tube that goes up my nose and down into my stomach to drain
bile into a bag. There’s one tube filling me with antibiotics and another feeding liquids to rehydrate me. And of course a
catheter until such time as I can make it to the toilet. I’m on a noisy ward close to the nurses’ station with the rest of
the high-dependency patients. I am alive.

Anxiety is a contradictory creature. For months and months I have been in a perpetual panic. Now, from the moment the doctor
said, “We’ll give it seventy-two hours; sometimes if we rest the bowel, these blockages clear themselves, otherwise we’ll
have to operate,” I became as calm as the Dalai Lama. Life has never before struck me as quite so random. Anything can happen
and often does. When you have absolutely no control over what’s happening to you, letting go is your only option. All these
months, when I’ve been unsuccessfully trying to make some order out of the chaos my life has become, I have been close to
breaking point. Suddenly, I feel as though a great burden had been lifted. Through the preoperative morphine haze, I found
myself thinking,
What will be, will be.

Twenty centimeters of my intestine have been removed in an operation that most certainly saved my life. Otherwise, I literally
would have exploded. Scar tissue from an appendectomy when I was fifteen had attached itself to my intestine and slowly strangled
it, causing an impenetrable blockage.

I am as wilted as an English lettuce past its sell-by date. Three days of starvation before they decided to go ahead and operate,
and up to a week’s more starvation to go, depending on when my bowel decides to crank itself up and start functioning again.
If my stomach was bloated before the operation, now everything is. When I touch my back, it feels waxy and hugely puffed out;
my ankles—never my best asset—are positively elephantine; my surgical stockings need to be replaced with a larger size. My
hair is slicked back and greasy, my skin is sallow, and my nose is covered with tape to hold the nose tube in place. I cannot
eat, drink, or sleep—the noise from other patients, the nurses clattering around their station, alarms and buzzers beeping,
make rest impossible. I stare up at the ceiling and think,
So, I’m alive
. I moisten my parched lips with a tiny sponge that I dip in a bowl of water on my bedside table. It’s the closest I’m going
to get to a meal for a while.

The first faces I saw when I came out of the anesthetic were those of Jack and Olly. My eyes opened for a few seconds before
my boulder-heavy lids dragged them shut again. I couldn’t speak.

“You’re going to be fine,” said Jack, stooping to gently raise and kiss my hand, lying limply on the bed. “The operation was
a complete success. I’ve just been speaking to the surgeon.”

Olly took Jack’s place and bent over to kiss my forehead. And then I was gone again.

When I opened my eyes for the second time, the two of them were still there, keeping vigil. My face felt strange. I touched
it and discovered I was wearing an oxygen mask. My first words were: “Who’s looking after Susanna?”

“Everything’s sorted,” said Jack. “You don’t have to worry about a thing. Mike and Stanko have taken up residence in the spare
room. Stanko’s not working at the moment, so he’s in charge of the dog. And Mike is taking a fortnight off after you get home
to help you convalesce.”

I smiled at the thought of Mike and his boyfriend moving in with me. “Oh, goody,” I said quietly, “it will be like
Will and Grace
.” But then it dawned on me that Jack hadn’t offered to move back in himself. I was already exhausted again. “What about you,
Ols?” I asked weakly.

“I’m fine. Doing lots of shifts at the bar, as I’ve only got a month to go.”

One month and Olly would be gone. What did I expect? To wake up to a whole new world with a husband who was coming home, a
son who wasn’t going away, an interesting new job, a mother who was not dying and who loved me, and a new birth certificate
to prove I’m twenty years younger than I thought I was?

“And you, Jack?”

“Stop worrying about everyone else, Hope. We’re all fine. And now you need to rest.”

I closed my eyes again. Actually, I wasn’t worrying. I’d just wanted to know how he was.

• • •

There is an endless stream of visitors to my bedside. Jack. Olly. Sarah. Maddy. My cousin Mike. Tanya. Sally and Nick. Mario.
Vanessa. Sharon, my leg waxer. Even Anita, although trust her to bring chocolates when she surely knows I can’t eat. I barely
have the strength to talk to any of them at first, but it matters to me that they’ve come. That they care.