Fifty Is Not a Four-Letter Word (8 page)

“Exactly as intended. You’re not supposed to get through the door.”

I hate this constant sniping. I know I’m an incessant nag. I know Olly needs to separate from me and that if he doesn’t, he’ll
turn into a mass murderer when he’s thirty-five. I know it’s normal. But I just can’t accept it. It really hurts.

“Look, I’m not nearly as awful as you make out.” This is pathetic, I know. “Have I even once asked you about Vanessa?” I can’t
believe I’m doing this. “Have I even hinted that going out with a woman almost twice your age might not be such a bright idea—”

Dammit, dammit, shit, bugger, and dammit. Now I’ve totally blown it. Me and my big bloody mouth.

• • •

Madeleine’s younger sister, Ruth, died, as expected. She was just forty-one. Madeleine was so brave at her funeral. If Sarah
were to die, I think I’d die, too. I certainly wouldn’t be brave.

The funeral took place at the Hoop Lane crematorium. Ruth’s twin sons, aged six, flanked their father, Ed, sitting bolt upright,
one hand in each of his throughout the service. Until he stood, went up to the podium, and read “Farewell, Sweet Dust” by
Elinor Wylie:

Now I have lost you, I must scatter

All of you on the air henceforth;

Not that to me it can ever matter

But it’s only fair to the rest of earth.

Now especially, when it is winter

And the sun’s not half so bright as he was,

Who wouldn’t be glad to find a splinter

That once was you, in the frozen grass?

Snowflakes, too, will be softer feathered,

Clouds, perhaps, will be whiter plumed;

Rain, whose brilliance you caught and gathered,

Purer silver have reassumed.

Farewell, sweet dust; I was never a miser:

Once, for a minute, I made you mine:

Now you are gone, I am none the wiser

But the leaves of the willow are bright as wine.

We all wept. And while we were weeping, to my teary-eyed astonishment, Olly passed by me in the aisle, clutching his acoustic
guitar. He sat down on a stool at the front, fixed his gaze in the middle distance, adjusted his strings, and began to play
“Thank You,” Dido’s first hit single. It’s the chorus everyone remembers. The sweet simplicity of it: “I want to thank you
for giving me the best day of my life.”

I was moved and I was amazed. Olly had babysat for the boys at least once a week from the age of fourteen to sixteen. I knew
he thought Ruth and Ed were pretty cool, and he’d sometimes pop in to see them and discuss new bands he’d discovered and thought
they might enjoy. But I had no idea Ruth had meant so much to him. I suppose he considered her as a friend rather than a parent
figure, and she was the first person that close to him who had died. By the time Olly reached the second chorus, everyone
was joining in.

Maddy, my best friend, who is divorced, no kids, was sitting next to me. She was too dazed to be distraught. When the ser-vice
came to an end, she whispered urgently in my ear: “I have to talk to you, Hope. Alone.”

“Let’s go round to the garden at the back. Everyone else will be gathering out front, so we should be able to find a quiet
spot.” To Jack, who was sitting on my other side, I said, “Be back in five.”

There was a bench, and we sat on it. Maddy immediately broke down.

“That service was so beautiful,” I said. “Ruth was so loved, and she knew it, even at the end. You’ll be a rock for the boys,
I know you will. And for Ed, too.”

Maddy sniffed and tried to speak, her voice barely above a whisper. “I’m so wicked. So wicked. I will never be able to live
with myself.”

“What are you talking about? Wicked? What’s with wicked? You need a large brandy when we get back to Ed’s.”

“But that’s just it. I can’t go back to Ed’s. I can’t go back to Ed’s or see the children ever again.”

“Please, Maddy, you’re not making sense. You’re still in shock. Of course you can see Ed and the children. They’ll need you
more than ever now.”

“I loved her so much, and I betrayed her. Can’t you see what a terrible thing I’ve done?”

“What terrible thing, Maddy? You were there for her, all the time you were there for her.”

When she next spoke, Maddy’s voice sounded different, cold and hard. “Not after lights-out in the hospice, I wasn’t. Not when
I was staying over at Ed’s to help out with the boys and make sure they got to school in the morning. Not when I was staying
in the spare room. Or rather, not staying in the spare room and sleeping in Ed’s bed, fucking my brother-in-law while my beloved
sister was dying. That’s what I mean by wicked, Hope. Do you get it now?”

“I, I . . . Jesus, Maddy, what am I supposed to say? I just don’t know what to think. But I do know you’re coming back to
Ed’s right now for the sake of the boys. And if I have to tie you up and bundle you into the trunk of my car to get you there,
that’s exactly what I’m going to do.” I grabbed her not at all gently by the arm and practically dragged her down the pathway
to the car park. “In!” I demanded when we reached the car, then I gave her a little shove toward the backseat. “Over here,
Jack,” I shouted, slamming the door on Maddy and waving at him across the car park.

When he got to the car, I simply said, “Maddy was feeling a bit too wobbly to face everyone. She’ll be okay by the time we’re
all back at the house.”

• • •

It’s Friday night, the gathering of the clans for the start-of-Sabbath family dinner. Sarah and I have taken turns sharing
this task since our mother decided about fifteen years back that life was too short to chop liver and onions. In fact, she
has given up cooking altogether since discovering her local Dial A Dinner. From Chinese, Indian, and Italian to British cod
and chips, there is no cuisine from anywhere in the world that can’t be delivered by a boy on a motorbike within thirty minutes
of ordering, then served straight out of nice, shiny aluminum cartons. My mother explained, “If you add up the time I save
in shopping and cooking and washing up, and calculate what I could get paid for those hours, you will come to realize that
takeaways are far more economical than doing it yourself.”

“Yes, Mummy,” I replied the first time she expounded the Jenny Lyndhurst Theory of Domestic Economy, “but you don’t actually
have a job or a salary, so your theory doesn’t really work.”

“I gave up work, if you remember,” said my mother frostily, “to look after you and your sister so you wouldn’t have to be
poor little latchkey children. Sometimes your ingratitude beggars belief.”

“But Mummy, I’m not criticizing you for not working. I’m just questioning your theory in light of the fact that you don’t
get paid.”

“My theory makes perfect sense. You’re so literal, Hope, you need to look at the broader picture. Daddy has always said that
I have a great head for business. Whether or not I work is beside the point. And in any case, Daddy and I are so enriched
from having developed our taste buds over the years. There is life beyond roast chicken, you know. Hope, it amazes me how,
with such traditional attitudes, you can be so successful in such a fast-moving world as the magazine industry.”

There’s no use arguing with my mother. She never did make sense and never will do. Although in retrospect, and in view of
my recent professional demise, her criticism verges on the prescient. But give up work for Sarah and me she did not; she gave
up working as a salesgirl in Harrods the day she married my father in 1949, when she was nineteen.

My mother fancies herself a bit of an artist, a bit of a Bloomsbury person. Instead of work, she has
projects
. And instead of making any sense, she has style and an air of expensive dishevelment. The fact that her projects never come
to anything doesn’t seem to bother my father one bit, but it bothers me a lot, and it probably accounts for why I’m so fixated
on seeing things through.

Sometimes her projects involved the entire family. When we were small—I think I was about five—there was the summer-of-the-stately-home
project, when we were dragged round all the grand houses of England, forced to ooh and aah at bits of old porcelain and swords
and hedges shaped like swans. One stately home might have been fun. Seventeen in six weeks?

Then there was the actress project. For about a year, my mother went to classes at something called the Actors Space. She
gave up all pretense at normal conversation and took to quoting Shakespeare over dinner. When my father bought her a bunch
of roses, she declared, predictably, “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” But then she added, “So from now on
in this household, we’re going to call them thistles.” From then on—and even now—she has always referred to roses as thistles.

This may be funny, for all I know—my school friends thought she was hilarious—but believe me, it’s not easy to live with.

Her sense of style, though, is indisputable. As are her good looks. Her hair used to be as fair as mine was dark (I inherit
my swarthiness from my father’s gene pool). When her hair changed color with age, it didn’t go the dull gray of industrial
scaffolding, like mine, exposing ugly metallic roots, but segued seamlessly from fair to brilliant white. If I didn’t dye
my hair, I’d look about a hundred; my mother turned white and it was barely noticeable. When I was a child, she looked like
Gwyneth Paltrow in dress-down mode; she favored floppy hats and crocheted tops and peasant skirts. Now she shops only in Egg,
a little boutique in Knightsbridge, and looks like a rather chic monk in layers of linens that twist and tie and drape and
cost a bomb; she has cropped white hair that suits her still-well-defined cheekbones.

My father does his own thing a lot of the time and leaves my mother to do hers—for him it used to be work, golf, bridge, the
Times
crossword, and reading; now that he’s retired, it’s golf, bridge, the
Times
crossword, reading, the Internet, and gardening—but when they’re in each other’s company, they’re like newlyweds. If he’s
not touching her arm or planting little kisses on the side of her face or the top of her head, he’s praising the way she looks.
“As beautiful as the day I met her,” he’s prone to saying. “And such style.” When they leave my house, I watch them walking
down the street toward their car, hand in hand. Of course it drives me demented. It’s not normal. Look at me and Jack.

• • •

On Friday nights there’s always quite a crowd. This Friday it’s Jack, Olly, and me; Sarah and William and Sam, their youngest
(Jessica and Amanda are away at college); Anita and Rupert; Jenny and Abe; and Maddy.

I suppose I’m more Jew-ish than Jewish. Not at all religious, but I find ritual reassuring and relish the sense of continuity
it brings. So I’ll light the two candles and say the Sabbath prayer in Hebrew, words I’ve learned by rote but couldn’t translate.
And then each person will kiss everyone else and wish them a good Shabbat. And then I’ll cut the challah bread and then we’ll
eat.

It would have been so easy to let things go when my mother gave up cooking, but it’s the only time the family really gets
together. My mum’s seventy-three now, so I suppose pushing sixty was a fair enough age for her to hand on the Friday-night
mantle. But I resent her having done so all the same. She’s in perfectly good health and has little else that’s pressing to
do with her time, as far as I can see, although she always purports to be extremely busy, what with the tai chi and the life-drawing
class and all the holidays she and Abe have to plan.

The truth is that my mother barely has to open her mouth to wind me up and turn me into an instantly petulant child. Sarah’s
so much more forgiving than I am. She’s grounded and sane and sensible and lets everything our mother says wash right over
her. I’m neurotic and nasty. It has occurred to me that maybe I have exactly the same effect on Olly that my mother does on
me, but I regularly pray—yes, I really do pray, although it’s less a conversation with God than a cry in the dark—that with
Olly, it’s a teen thing he’s going through. I try and take comfort from the fact that Olly and I remained umbilically attached
until he was at least ten. With my mother and me, it has been like civil war from the very beginning.

I serve up the usual: chicken soup with lokshen (that’s noodles in English) and knaidlach, a kind of dumpling made with matzo
meal; roast chicken with crispy roast potatoes, broccoli, peas, and lots of oniony gravy; apple and blackberry crumble with
ice cream. My father murmurs his appreciation: “So nice to have a good roast.” I take particular pleasure in this, certain
that he prefers my home cooking to my mother’s international takeaways.

My father goes on, “Last night we had something called Bali hi, and I choked on some peanuts. Mind you, it was delicious,
wasn’t it, dear?”

“Not Bali hi, Abe, pad Thai. I think you do it on purpose.” My mother giggles skittishly. Unbelievable! I could swear she’s
flirting with her husband of almost fifty-five years. My dad looks at her like a smitten young suitor, taking away the advantage
I scored with the simple, wholesome roast chicken.

“Pad Thai, you must all try it if you haven’t already,” my mother continues, as if opening up a whole world of exotic possibilities
to the assembled crowd. “And yes, it was delicious. We’ve discovered this marvelous new restaurant that’s opened locally,
and Dial A Dinner is featuring it as their restaurant of the month.” My father grins back at her as if he’s the luckiest man
in the world.

“Anyone going on the march tomorrow?” asks Olly.

“I should hope not,” says Anita.

“Why’s that?” asks Jack.

“Because, quite clearly, if you are against the war, you are for Saddam Hussein. It’s that simple. Isn’t that so, Rupert?”

“Yes, dear.”

“Oh, dear,” says my mother. “I was planning on going on a little shopping expedition to Knightsbridge tomorrow. Perhaps not
such a good idea after all. Do you think I’d get through? Will the march will be very big?”

“Could be as many as a hundred thousand, according to the news,” says Jack. “Hope, Maddy, and I will be there, though we’ll
probably head straight for the rally in Hyde Park rather than walk the distance with the crowd.”