Hampstead, London NW3: Sunday, August 3, 1958
Sir Rodyon Troy, Bart, MA, DSO, DFC, MP, Shadow Home Secretary, a man never entirely sure in which order his plethora of initials should follow, awoke one morning to find he was no longer fifty.
“Oh fuck,” he said to no one, for the room was empty.
“Oh fuck.”
He remembered the opening of Orwell’s Coming Up for Air … “It was the day I got me new false teeth …” but then his mind drifted to The History of Mr. Polly, whose awareness of the rigidity of middle-age was summed up in the words, “Hole, rotten beastly hole.” This struck him as more appropriate—he was in H. G. Wells’s old house, in H. G.’s old bedroom, and in all likelihood in H. G.’s old bed … all bought as a job lot by his father in 1910.
He was not unprepared for this. For weeks now his wife had been saying things like … “We ought to get the family together” or “Do you fancy a bit of a do? You promised a bit of a do if we ignored your birthday last year.”
The shock of being “over fifty” was not one of intellectual revelation. It was visceral. The knowledge in tendon, bone, and gut that he was “over fifty.”
“Oh fuck,” he said to no one, his wife having risen some half an hour before.
He knew where she was. A smell of Twinings Blue Mountain medium-roast coffee was wafting up the stairs from the kitchen five floors below. He could see her in the mind’s eye. Blonde mop tucked up in a towel. Her blue silk dressing gown, so long it swept the floor. Perhaps it all augured well. Perhaps he’d get breakfast in bed for his fifty-first. Perhaps there’d be hanky-panky and high jinks to follow.
And his mind drifted back to the willowy, captivating blonde he’d met in the late spring of 1931, when he’d gone back to his old college—Trinity, Cambridge—for “a bit of a do,” and found himself drawn to this gorgeous twenty-one-year-old, just about to graduate from Newnham in Applied Biology.
“To what do you apply it?” he’d said, thinking himself the soul of wit.
And she had applied it to him. And he to her. Ever after.