No! I Don’t Need Reading Glasses! Read online

  No! I Don’t Need Reading Glasses!

  First published in Great Britain in 2013 by

  Quercus

  55 Baker Street

  7th Floor, South Block

  London W1U 8EW

  Copyright © 2013 Virginia Ironside

  The moral right of Virginia Ironside to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  HB ISBN 978 1 78087 858 4

  TPB ISBN 978 1 78206 077 2

  EBOOK ISBN 978 1 78087 859 1

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  You can find this and many other great books at:

  www.quercusbooks.co.uk

  Also by Virginia Ironside

  No! I Don’t Want to Join a Bookclub

  The Virginia Monologues

  Janey and Me

  You’ll Get Over It – the Rage of Bereavement

  Goodbye, Dear Friend - Coping With The Death Of A Pet

  Problems! Problems! Confessions of an agony aunt

  How To Have A Baby And Stay Sane

  Made For Each Other

  Distant Sunset

  Chelsea Bird

  Children’s Books

  The Huge Bag Of Worries

  Phantom of Burlap Hall

  SpaceBoy At Burlap Hall

  Vampire Master

  Poltergeist of Burlap Hall

  The Human Zoo

  Roseanne And The Magic Mirror

  For Denis Whyte

  JANUARY

  1 January

  Oh gawd. Woke up with the most terrible hangover, panting for water, heart beating, sweating … very unlike me. Haven’t had one like this since the sixties. (And now I remember it, I didn’t feel too hot after my retirement party, either, at the school, but that was because the booze was provided by the science master who had prided himself on Making His Own Beer.)

  Managed to crawl out of bed and have a cup of coffee and a piece of toast, and overcome with great desire to have five fried eggs, but even though I’ve had two, nothing makes a lot of difference. It being New Year’s Day, a strange silence has descended over London, which makes me feel as if I am the heroine in a very bad film in which I’m the only person alive in a world which has been struck by a strange kind of sleeping sickness. Looked out of my window to the street below and there is absolutely no one about. Hardly any cars, either. Everyone’s away I suppose. And when I looked out of the bedroom window – nothing there either. Well, there isn’t usually anyone around at the back, of course, and I would be most surprised to see anybody mooching around my lawn on New Year’s Day, or any day come to that, but there isn’t even the sound of a distant chainsaw or screaming baby or the pounding thump of a far-off radio.

  Must say the garden looks particularly squalid. I suppose the viburnum will be out soon, but it can’t be soon enough. The garden’s one of those long thin affairs, with grass in the middle and overgrown with bushes and trees at the sides. Last summer it looked as lush as a tropical rain forest, but nothing looks good on New Year’s Day. It’s just a grey swamp of mud and desolation, with the odd fat pigeon standing around wondering if he should make the huge effort of taking off to escape the claws and jaws of Pouncer, my cat, and Pouncer sitting there equally weary and bloated, wondering if he can be bothered to get himself into his wiggling position to make a move on the pigeon.

  I shall go back to bed. With any luck I’ll wake up fizzing with life and full of beans. With even more luck I’ll sleep until next week, when life will be back to normal.

  3 January

  The world is slowly waking up, and so am I. I’ve decided to do something I haven’t done since I was about ten. Make a list of New Year’s resolutions. So here goes.

  Never drink again, and certainly never mix champagne, red wine and rum punches. (I’ve only just begun to recover. The old brain cells are starting to return to life, like the bubbles at the bottom of a pan of boiling water.)

  Have a facelift.

  Try acupuncture to see if makes any difference to my increasing stiffness. I’m starting to walk around like one of those little wooden Dutch dolls that were so popular in Victorian times.

  Sort out the entire house room by room, chucking things out. I have far too much stuff.

  Write a diary. (Which I’ve already started doing.)

  Start painting again.

  Penny, my great friend who lives round the corner, suggested I should make ‘travelling more’ one of my resolutions, but I’m old enough to know now that travelling doesn’t get you anywhere, if that doesn’t sound ridiculous. I’ve often thought that going away would do me good and ‘get me out of myself’, so I’ve packed my suitcase and rushed off to Timbuktu, say, and when I’ve got there I’ve opened my suitcase and out has popped the same old self I wanted to get away from.

  So, frankly, I’d rather stay at home.

  It may seem odd to put ‘Have a facelift’ so high on my list, but at the New Year’s Eve party a creepy old man (I say ‘old’ – he was probably my age) came up to me and said in what he thought was a seductive and flattering voice, ‘You remind me of a Burmese princess’ and I realised exactly why I’d reminded him of a Burmese princess, and it wasn’t because I looked gorgeous, Eastern and sultry. No, the seductive slit-eyed look had been achieved only because my eyelids droop over my eyes so much.

  And why am I starting a diary again? I did write one when I was sixty, but it fizzled out after a year for the simple reason I was ludicrously happy. And if one’s tiptop happy, why write a diary? It would be so boring. Imagine: ‘Monday: great day. Tuesday: Sun was out, felt marvellous. Wednesday: Saw Penny, she is really nice. Thursday: gave a great dollop of cash to charity and felt a warm glow. Friday: ‘How lucky I am to be alive!’ and so on.

  Anyway, when you’re full of beans, there’s no time for writing a diary because you’re so busy doing jolly things like arranging suppers with friends, putting bulbs in pots for Christmas and tucking them away under the stairs, chortling at reruns of Laurel and Hardy on YouTube, repainting the spare room, thinking about sorting out all your photographs from ages ago into neat albums (notice I just say ‘thinking about’) or simply sitting with a loved one doing … well, not very much. When you’re with someone, it’s not having them around to do things with that’s nice. It’s having them around to do nothing with.

  And nothing was what I did a lot of with my darling Archie for quite a while after I’d rediscovered the old love of my life at the grand old age of sixty. He was a man I’d been crazy about ever since I was a teenager, but who I’d lost touch with when we’d both married different people. Once our marriages were over – I was divorced from David and Archie’s wife had died – we found each other again. And though the cuddly nights together were gorgeous, we also spent a lot of time just mooching about. We’d often go for walks near his vast Victorian pile in a remote corner of Devon, tramping through the parkland, into the fields and round the farms nearby, in complete silence. Not that awful kind of seething-with-resentment silence, the sort of silence after which one person says, nervously, ‘What’s the mat
ter?’ and the other person answers, ‘Nothing!’ in a loud and furious voice – thank God those days are over! – but an easy, companionable silence.

  Sometimes we’d chat a bit and joke, and make plans for the future or ruminate over the past – I’d tell him about the ghastly times I’d had with David (now one of my bestest friends) and the ghastly times David had had with me, and he’d tell me about life with his late wife Philippa with a mixture of such pain and affection in his voice that I couldn’t be jealous. (How could I, when she’d made Archie’s life so happy?)

  Sometimes we’d talk about my son Jack, his wife Chrissie and my adored and adorable grandson Gene – and we’d shared the joy of the marriage of his daughter Sylvie to Harry, her childhood sweetheart.

  Now, right from the start Archie and I had decided we would never live together. Both of us were savvy enough to realise that it would have been a dreadful idea, particularly as, since I’d got divorced, I’d learned to be happy on my own. (Oddly, this is something it’s very difficult to unlearn. Once you’ve got used to being in command of the remote control, and sitting in the driving seat of the car and deciding what to have for supper and how far apart to space the plates when stacking the dishwasher and at what point you think the dishwasher is full enough for a wash, and how thinly to chop up the carrots and where to buy the fish and when to turn out the light in bed and making all those decisions that are so important in life, it’s hard to relinquish control and share.)

  Sometimes I think we actually turn into a different shape when we’re single. From our edges being all bumps and dips while we were searching for a partner, and constantly looking for another piece of a jigsaw puzzle to fit into, we become smooth and round and self-contained. And much less capable of slotting neatly into someone else’s personality. Unless, of course, they have a personality like a great round vacuum which is, of course, not a very attractive personality in any case. But Archie and I often spend weekends together. He comes up to my Edwardian terraced house in Shepherd’s Bush in London, or I go down to Devon – always packing my electric blanket, and wearing my special Heat-Tech underwear from UniGlo on top of a silk vest and pair of under-leggings, and woolly knickers.

  Unlike me, Archie has lots of money, but like a lot of grand country people really hates spending it on anything as decadent as heating. So you go into his vast and gloomy stone kitchen and it’s awash with all the latest gadgets, and spotless slate worktops, and the bedrooms all have swagged chintz curtains (albeit hanging by a thread), but the actual house is perishing. Indeed, if I ever find myself doing the cooking down there, I wear a hat and a scarf and my overcoat, and I once cut down a pair of woollen gloves to make mittens to wear indoors. Sometimes I even put the oven on and leave it open, just to get a bit more heat. And I’m such a naturally cold-blooded person that the temperature only has to be one degree under freezing that, if I shield a sneeze from others by covering my face, I need a kettle of boiling water to provide enough steam to prise my frosty fingers from my icy nose. I have about as much circulation as an inland lake.

  I should take up knitting, but after the huge effort of making Gene, my grandson, a pair of tiny socks on four needles, when he was born, I don’t think I could ever wind a piece of wool round another pair of needles again. So complicated!

  So, there’s been no diary-writing for a time, anyway. After all, one keeps a diary not only for comfort but also in the weird hope that someone might come across it hundreds of years later and one might be heralded as the new Mr Pepys, though whether old computer files will last till another century is another matter. Perhaps I should get a quill pen and start writing this by hand rather than banging away on my laptop. Jack gave me this thing for Christmas, in an effort to drag his poor old mum into what I still call the twentieth century – though of course it is now the twenty-first. And I am determined to get the hang of it, even though the keyboard appears to be made for people with very tiny fingers, like goblins. Secretly I rather prefer the cranky old computer I have in my workroom.

  Anyway, back to the diary. It’s a place you can write all the stuff you can’t tell your friends, where you can go over the top or be really mean about your nearest and dearest without hurting them. It’s a good pal, or a chum as we used to say when I was a girl, which now seems like millions of years ago though actually I was ten in 1957. And a pal or chum is what I’m starting to need now that things aren’t quite as – well, how can I put it? – quite as superlatively brilliant as they were when I was sixty. And because, while I’m still delighted not to be young and believe I’m happier now than I’ve ever been, things haven’t worked out in quite the ecstatic way I was hoping for at the end of my sixtieth year.

  What do they say now instead of ‘chums’ or ‘pals’? Mates? Guys? I’ve got a friend who, when she sees me with someone else, even with another woman, always shouts ‘Hi, you guys!’ It always makes me feel a bit peculiar, as if I might have suddenly sprouted a moustache or gone bald in the last five minutes.

  Now, why am I not as all-singing and all-dancing as I was? For one thing, I’m now nearly sixty-five – in only a couple of weeks in fact – which is rather nearer seventy than it was before. I’ve certainly ratcheted down a couple of notches. (When you’re older, and you suffer some great blow like a major operation or even a very severe dose of flu, you never quite get back to where you started. It’s a kind of ten steps back and only nine steps forward situation.) The other day I caught myself talking to myself. Actually, I never realised quite what an interesting person I was until this started. But still … In a way it’s quite a good thing, this encroaching loopiness. I never used to exercise, but now my heart is constantly getting a work-out just by racing round the house looking for my glasses or panicking that I’ve left my bath running.

  The main problem has been Archie. About two years ago, I realised that Archie was actually starting to behave rather oddly. It began with him forgetting my name. We laughed it off as a senior moment, but then I noticed a bit of paper on his desk one day on which he’d made a list of the names of all the characters he knew: Hardy (his dog), James (our mutual friend), Philippa (his late wife), Harry (his son-in-law), Mrs Evans (his cleaner), Marie (that’s me), Sylvie (his daughter), Gene (my grandson), Jack (my son). David (my ex). It looked suspiciously like a reminder list. I was also slightly miffed, to be honest, to see that I was so far down. And the other thing was that his writing looked peculiar. Not quite as strong as it used to be. A bit wiggly. Or, to be really honest, shaky. Jolly important as you age to keep your handwriting strong and certain. Before I write anything these days I always take a deep breath to make sure my elegant italic looks full of purpose and intent. You don’t want it looking all quavery. Dead giveaway.

  The next thing Archie did that struck a note of deep anxiety was to buy a very rare and expensive new rosebush for his garden and become furious when it died. First he’d been convinced that Hardy had peed on it, but just before he fired off an enraged letter to the company which had supplied it, I passed it in the garden and noticed a bit of polythene poking up through the earth around the base of the dead bush. I could see at once what the problem was. He’d planted it with the polythene packaging still on! Was that the act of a man in full possession of all his marbles? I don’t think so. This was a man who used to win prizes for his roses; a man who was so scrupulous about his gardening that he actually used to double-dig, and anyone who’s done that knows this is serious stuff.

  And since the rose bush episode I’ve been noticing other heartbreaking things about him. For instance, after a day out shopping recently, he came back to my house wearing a brand-new loden coat. Now many people wouldn’t think anything of anyone buying a loden coat. I mean why not? Very warm and green and full. But I understand Archie well enough to know that he’s not a loden coat-man. Only certain men like loden coats. And Archie isn’t one of them. He’s a hairy-old-fishing-coat-from-Savile-Row sort of person. He doesn’t possess a jacket that hasn’t got l
eather patches sewn onto the elbows. Indeed, it’s quite unlike him to buy anything new at all, being of a generation, like myself, which finds forking out for a new anything rather extravagant, particularly if we have some old rag hanging in the cupboard that can be repaired instead. I’ve been known to dig out the sticky remains of my lipstick from its little tube with a pin, and then smear it on my lips with my fingers, rather than go out and get a new one. And I’ll never ever throw a chicken carcass away. I devil the legs, boil up the bones for stock, and once managed to eke out a bird for ten days. It’s the spirit of austerity that still clings on from childhood. Make do and mend.

  When Jack stayed the other night, just before Christmas – he was on his way back from a trip to New York and his car conked out in Shepherd’s Bush before he could get home so he spent his jet-lagged night with his ma – he said in the morning that he’d slept fine except that there had been a rather uncomfortable ridge down the middle of the bottom sheet. I told that him that it was because in some ghastly recession in the seventies, I decided to resort to an old wartime habit of my mother’s when the centre of the sheet was worn, and I’d cut it in two, swapped the sides around and resewn it. My son gave a snort, partly of laughter and partly of disgust.

  ‘Mum!’ he said. ‘You may be broke, but for heaven’s sake, you can surely afford new sheets! Go down the market, it’ll only be a tenner! I’ve now got a red line down the middle of my back that will take days to disappear! What will Chrissie think I’ve been up to?’

  But I digress. Back to Archie’s loden coat.

  ‘That’s very nice!’ I said, lying my head off, when he showed it to me – it was one of his weekends in London with me and he’d been to a sale in Regent Street. The coat was billiardtable green, with narrow leathery binding round the collar, a thin chain instead of a top button, and it had a split in the back with a bit more material in the pleat so that it swung out when he walked. It featured small buttons in the shapes of tiny barrels and, worst of all, there were two Sherlock Holmes-type flaps across the shoulders. Funny, those flaps. However tall a man is, those flaps always take about a foot off his height. The problem was that there was far too much material involved. The coat was slightly too long for Archie – even the sleeves – and he looked like a mixture of a small Hollywood millionaire and an insect, the big sort you find in rainforests. Not a good look.