Mutton, page 8
Maybe I’m jealous. Am I jealous, I wonder as I stick the kettle back on? I’m jealous of her looks, certainly: I’d also like to look thirty-six. Wouldn’t I? Well, yes, up to a point – but I’m not sure about that point involving a knife, and the deranged-seeming amount of maintenance that being Gaby clearly involves. And anyway, how much can you do, really? Bodies are bodies: you can nip and tuck all you like, but you’re still your real age underneath; you are still getting older. Things – invisible, important things – are still slowing down or falling apart. My greatest fear, when it comes to ageing, is dementia, but now I have a new one: dementia when you’re seventy but look fifty. It must happen to some people. I bet you see it in LA, or Miami: frisky-looking hottie MILFs who are completely gaga.
I open my powder compact and stare at my face again. Good job, Dr Halliday. But that’s probably enough of that.
9
It’s not a complete U-turn, though, because having decided that I’ve gone as far as I’m prepared to go with invasive procedures, I start to think about the non-invasive stuff. If I can temporarily look better without anyone sticking anything into me, is there any harm in that? I discover that you can get a facial that involves microdermabrasion and something called ‘high frequency’; that there are spectacular eyelash extensions, which take two hours and apparently obviate the need for any further eye make-up; that there is a Shellac manicure that will apparently last for weeks; that you can get a fake tan from a person rather than a tube (this, I read, involves wearing paper pants and standing in a pop-up tent being hosed with liquid brown stuff, as though one had a peculiar and unsavoury fetish). Also – and, OK, this isn’t entirely non-invasive – I have made an appointment with a Mr Kimball to discuss veneers. It’s just a chat.
I’ve lost a bit of weight by accident (and there’s a sentence I never thought I’d write). It’s to do with the fact that I now eat with Gaby, more often than not, and with her asking if I want whatever she’s having. Usually I say yes, especially if the older children are out. I am rewarded with kale and brown rice, or variants thereon, in microscopic portions. Not that I’m complaining: we’re hardly in a longing-for-seconds situation. We sit there opposite each other, chewing away: apparently we need to chew each mouthful at least twenty-five times, though Gaby says it’s good to aim for fifty. The scallops and chorizo, the chicken tajines, the pulled pork and rare steaks and salads and dark chocolate mousses that I used to make for the Man From The Connaught are all a receding memory, like the tide going out and never coming in again while you stand on the shore in disbelief. The food Gaby and I eat together is frugal, nun-like, entirely shorn of pleasure, and I think how odd it should be that you have to eat like hungry poor people in order to look expensive. Although actually I’m not 100 per cent certain that hungry poor people devour kale in the way that we do.
There is no love in the food we consume, which – as a devoted eater – surprises me too. I don’t think I’ve ever eaten loveless food in a home. I make my children’s food with love, even when it’s boring and I’m fed up and they’re being so annoying that actual love is thin on the ground. I’ve always associated food with love, which is why I like cooking, and why I’ve never been skinny. Robert and I ate the food I’d cooked with relish, even though back then my repertoire was initially limited to roast chicken and pasta. Sam and I loved lingering over kitchen suppers with a bottle of wine, the children safely tucked up upstairs. With the Man who I said I’d stop mentioning – and I will, I will – I used to send everyone off to school in the mornings and then sit for ages with open cookbooks, feeling complete joy at the idea of making something delicious for us to eat together.
But now we have this new way of eating. Gaby can barely cook, though she insists on doing it – ‘Least I can do, darling’ – and there is nothing sensual or enjoyable about eating the results. It strikes me as a sad way to eat and a sad way to live. Except I’ve lost a stone. And there you have it: the eternal tussle between pleasure and vanity.
Today, though, there will be no kale: kale can do one. Today it’s jelly and ice cream and sausage rolls and cake and Rocky Road and brownies, and a massive dish of macaroni cheese as a nod to proper food (‘My God, the carbs!’ said Gaby when I told her what the menu was). It is Maisy’s ninth birthday, which means a gathering of the clan.
I’m obsessed with celebrating birthdays – with any large celebration, actually: see also Christmas. All my family are, because they remind us of when we were little and innocent and happy, when nothing was complicated. Things are no longer uncomplicated, but we muddle through, even though the family gatherings can be as stressful as they are deeply comforting.
Today Sam, Maisy’s dad, is coming over early so he can help me with the bunting and then pick her up from school. The hallway is decorated with home-made posters that Jack, Sky and I painted last night; I am especially pleased with the one that says, ‘How fine, how very fine, to wake up and be NINE’. There are flowers, and cards propped up the whole length of the kitchen table, and multicoloured streamers dangling from the chandelier.
Sam, whom I haven’t seen since a couple of days after Gaby moved in, races in for a parking permit, sticks it on his car and then comes back in carrying a pile of presents. We kiss hello. He pulls back and says, ‘Clara? What’s going on here?’
‘Oh dear, is it happening already? So tragic. So young. It’s Maisy’s ninth birthday and you’ve come to tea,’ I say. I raise my voice. I don’t know why mildly irritating Sam amuses me so much. ‘YOU’VE COME TO TEA,’ I repeat, taking his arm. ‘Come on, love. I’ll show you to A COMFY SEAT. DO YOU NEED TO GO WEE-WEES?’
‘Tsk,’ Sam says, taking his arm away but laughing despite himself. ‘I’ve never known anyone more annoying. You have a mental age of six. It was just, in the light there, you looked different for a second. Have you changed your hair? But never mind. Where shall I put the presents?’
‘Do I look well?’ I ask.
‘What?’ He glances at me. ‘Yeah. Why? You always look well.’
‘But do I look especially well?’
‘What do you want me to do with this bunting? Yes, you look very well. I told you. Who else is coming to tea?’
‘The usual suspects, plus Gaby – you know, my friend from LA who I was at school with and who’s living here.’
‘Oh yes, that’s right. How’s that working out?’
‘All fine. I thought across the ceiling in zigzags, for the bunting, and then maybe over the doorway and across the window. The ladder’s upstairs.’
I continue decorating Maisy’s cake as he wanders off to get the ladder. Sam reappears three minutes later, accompanied by Gaby, who despite it being the middle of the afternoon is dressed like she’s going clubbing.
‘Ah, good, you’ve met,’ I say, not able to take my eyes off Gaby. She is wearing fishnet tights, DMs, a very short skirt, a T-shirt that says ‘The Vaccines’ and a battered denim jacket. Her left wrist, which usually features a smart, thin gold bangle, is today loaded with friendship bands and silver beaded bracelets that reach midway up her arm. Her nails are fluorescent yellow. She’s had her extensions redone and her shiny red waves are now a veritable mane.
‘Have you borrowed Sky’s clothes?’ I say, but in a friendly way.
‘You might have told me how gorgeous Sam was,’ she says, batting her inch-long falsies at him. ‘Matter of fact, I have. Well, the jacket and the T-shirt.’
‘I like the Vaccines,’ says Sam, looking slightly flustered.
‘No idea who they are,’ Gaby says cheerfully. ‘I like the Stones and Madonna from the Eighties. God, look at all this food. Can I help?’
‘Thanks, but it’s all under control. So, er, are you and your new look going somewhere?’
‘I’ve asked Ben to tea,’ says Gaby. ‘He had the day off. I hope that’s OK.’
Actually, it’s mildly annoying: a complete stranger inserted into the family birthday tea.
‘No problem,’ I say.
‘What?’ says Gaby.
‘Nothing,’ I say.
‘It’s my clothes, right?’
‘I’m trying to work out what I think,’ I say, laughing. ‘I’m sort-of admiring.’
‘Are you thinking mutton?’ says Gaby, laughing too, and I know her well enough to detect a small degree of uncertainty.
‘Oh, darling, not really. Well, yes. A bit. A tiny bit. But I’m trying to decide whether it’s actually mutton when you can pull it off so well. I mean, you’ve got a better figure than lots of twenty-year-olds.’
‘That’s what I think,’ says Gaby. ‘I did wonder, for a nanosecond, but then I thought, “Nah, it’s fine.” ’
‘I’m uncomfortable,’ says Sam from halfway up his ladder, ‘with the fact that I am overhearing this conversation. It’s very woman-y.’
‘Well, what do you think?’ asks Gaby. ‘I mean, you’re a man. An attractive man. How do I look?’
‘Um,’ says Sam.
‘Well?’ says Gaby.
‘You look great,’ Sam says. ‘Everyone looks great.’
‘I need to be thirty-four,’ Gaby tells him, quite disarmingly. ‘Do I look thirty-four?’
‘You look,’ Sam says, ‘like an … urban … ah … thirty-four-year-old … that … mmm … likes partying.’
‘Perfect,’ Gaby says with a pleased smile. ‘Thanks, Sam.’
It’s so hard to know, with mutton. Part of the reason is that all of these questions only arise when you emerge from the wreckage of having small children, and what you thought you knew isn’t necessarily how things actually are, or rather how things have remained. I wear fishnets all the time, for example: they are my tight of choice, on the basis that they are the least claustrophobic. And I own more than one shrunken denim jacket, and I have T-shirts, obviously, though not so much indie-band ones, on the basis that I don’t want to dress like my children. (This is also why I don’t own any trousers that actually show my arse.) There’s nothing wrong with DMs, plus they’re practical. The skirt is insanely short, but then she very much has the legs for it. I mean, technically she looks great. She certainly doesn’t look tarty, which up until now has always been my most reliable measure of mutton: you want a hint of possibility, I think, but at a certain age ‘yoohoo’ turns into ‘sexually desperate’, which is really a look a person wants to avoid at all costs.
But there are so many potential pitfalls: the V-neck that’s suddenly too deep; the heels that mutate from playfully sexy into ‘aged swinger’ in the space of five birthdays; the leopard-skin coat that transforms from ‘goes with everything, almost a neutral’ into ‘I charge extra for anal.’ Denim shorts, frayed or otherwise; ‘amusing’ patterned tights; anything that looks like underwear; charms on handbags; leather (rawr); being painfully on-trend – a couple of years ago, this involved being dressed like a Goth, with your Camden Market In The Eighties crucifix and your purple lipstick: I mean, who in their right mind, aged over forty? And then of course there’s the full horror of the Little Girl look: bunches, plaits, broderie anglaise, espadrilles with ribbons that criss-cross up the leg, satin ballet shoes; even the harmless sundress is sometimes not exempt. Any clothes that make you look like you skip rather than walk, basically. Any clothes that say, ‘Hewwo Daddy, pleathe may I have an ithe cweam?’
But it depends, doesn’t it? It so confusingly depends. I bet Gaby would look great in a little-girly broderie anglaise peasant blouse, tanned shoulder peering out. And my own clothes aren’t all age-appropriate either: I like a tight frock and I like a tea-dress, where I should probably like rectangular grey shifts and trouser suits and bags that hint at the boardroom. I hate clothes that unsex you, though I have the feeling they’re the clothes women my age are supposed to head for: plain, safely androgynous, not putting any ideas in anybody’s head, because God forbid. Joyless clothes for the perimenopausal. I mean, urgh. It’s brutal. It’s ‘Women, know your place,’ and the place in question is ‘out to pasture with the old donkeys’. No thanks. Not quite yet, eh?
But it’s so hard to know with the stuff I do like. I realize I’ve been relying on some internal radar, some warning twitch of the antennae. What are the actual rules? I think Gaby looks amazing, but on the wrong side of them – whatever they may be. I don’t want anyone to laugh at her. Would they laugh, though? Is someone looking great regardless of their age really that hilarious, or is the laughter tinged with envy, as in ‘I wish I could wear that, but I can’t, so I’m going to snigger at the woman who can’?
If you’re one of the sniggerers, you may have embraced the notion of women of a certain age adopting a ‘signature look’. This is not so good, because it can go very wrong. It’s how you end up with women from Notting Hill in leather trousers, aged sixty-three (which can work, actually, as a look. Sometimes. If you’re a former supermodel). And it’s how you also end up with retired women who know the little Eighties business suits aren’t quite right any more, but have forgotten how to shop and so head for those weird ‘boutiques’ for the middle-aged, where they sell you enormous, deliberately outsized garments that are supposed to indicate ‘relaxed yet stylish’ but just make you look like a sack-shaped hippo. Also, fatally, it’s how you end up with women who are a size 14 or over wearing smocks and enormous wooden jewellery, with ‘interesting’ scarves, the tails hanging over the stomach as though to conceal the most improbable, the most grotesque of pregnancies.
There is a sub-genre, which my sisters and I call Hampstead Lady, due to overexposure to the species as children. Hampstead Lady – she is also to be found in other bourgeois-bohemian neighbourhoods – does the smock and the huge jewellery, but with an ethnic spin, as though she were in fact a painter of Rajasthani or Aboriginal landscapes. It’s not ugly, or even visually displeasing, but let’s put it this way – Hampstead Lady isn’t batting the boys away with a stick.
I’m interested in being attractive.
And in any case, why should a middle-aged woman who is fit and healthy not wear a backless dress, or a mini, or a garment that shows her body? Maybe it’s time we took the mutton and wrestled it to the ground. It’s not like the alternatives are that terrific.
So many questions – and so many rings of the doorbell, for here come the loved ones. You see, Kate’s got it right. She’s in her early sixties – she had me very young – and she looks in her early sixties, but in a great and enviable way. It helps that when anyone is rude enough to ask her age, she whacks ten years on, and then smiles pleasantly when people express their amazement at her vitality and superhuman state of preservation. Neither Kate, nor my sisters, nor I have ever understood why people would lie the other way if the object is to impress people, but then all of us are strangers to the knife, which is to say none of us are Gaby. On cue:
‘Gaby!’ Kate says, whooshing in in a cloud of Shalimar. ‘Clara, take these parcels, please. They are too heavy for me. Good grief, Gaby. You look extraordinary.’
‘Hello, Kate,’ says Gaby, going over to give her a hug. ‘Long time no see.’
‘You look like an infant,’ Kate cries. ‘And I can almost see your nappy.’
‘Steady on,’ Gaby laughs, tugging at her skirt.
‘No, you look like an embryo. A zygote, Gaby. An actual zygote. Hello, everyone. Clara, don’t put the parcels like that, in an ugly pile, all clumped. It’s disrespectful to my beautiful wrapping. Where’s Maisy?’
‘Changing her dress for the third time.’
Kate’s eyes haven’t left Gaby. ‘Can I see behind your ears, Gaby?’ she now asks.
‘Kate!’ I say.
‘Kate!’ Gaby squeals, and actually blushes.
‘What?’ Kate says. ‘As Gaby was just pointing out, we’ve known each other a long time.’
‘My ears are private,’ Gaby says with dignity. ‘And also, Kate – I have this new boyfriend and he’s going to turn up any minute, and he thinks I’m thirty-four. So could you, like, not reminisce about me and Clara watching Bagpuss, or go on about looking behind my ears?’
‘Darling, please,’ Kate says. ‘Why would I come somewhere and talk to a stranger about Bagpuss?’
‘I know,’ says Gaby. ‘It’s just, it would really suck if you inadvertently …’
‘Let the cat out the bag,’ I guffaw.
‘The wit,’ says Kate. ‘My conversational skills are highly evolved. Bagpuss! For heaven’s sake. Your little secret is safe with me. Now, Gaby, come and sit here and let me look behind your ears.’
‘No,’ Gaby shrieks. ‘Leave my ears alone.’
‘I will get to look, you know, whether you like it or not,’ Kate says, laughing. She can be quite monomaniacal, Kate. ‘But maybe later. Impressive work, though.’
‘Thanks,’ Gaby says uncertainly.
‘Mm,’ says Kate. ‘Of course there’s that terrible problem – what’s it called: 1664, 1056, 1789? Something like that. Seventeen from the back, eighty-nine from the front. Not that you look eighty-nine, obviously, darling. But still. The turning-around issue.’
‘Tea, Mother?’ I interrupt.
‘On the other hand, I don’t suppose you scuttle into rooms backwards, Gaby, and then flip yourself round so that everyone gasps with shock. So it’s fine, I expect. Usually.’
‘Biscuit with your tea? Cheese straw? Iced gem?’
‘I try not to go into rooms backwards, no,’ says Gaby. ‘Ah, Christ – here’s Ben. Please, Kate. Please stop going on about it, just for now.’
‘The infant boyfriend! I look forward to meeting him,’ Kate says. ‘My unaugmented lips are sealed.’ She mimes zipping them shut and then laughs to herself as Gaby throws her a dark look.
Jack and Sky have ambled in; Jack’s brother, Charlie, understands the momentousness of family birthdays and is on his way home from university, and will be here any minute; my sister Flo and her brood honk to indicate they’ve pulled up outside. Robert appears at the same time as Ben, having left work early, bearing a huge bunch of flowers. Maisy, resplendent in white sequins and two tiaras, runs around chatting, sitting on everyone’s laps, and slowly begins to open her presents while we start drinking tea and digging in to the industrial quantities of food. Ben is sitting by Gaby, who is still throwing Kate anxious looks.
