Have you noticed that one doesn’t grow older gracefully? It happens in fits and starts. There is the day you stop reading Dr Spock and go out and buy a book about the menopause. Or the day you buy a new coat and someone says: ‘Good heavens, you do look with it!’ How long, one wonders, has one been soldiering on without it?
Or perhaps it is the day when your husband stops calling you ‘Moon of my delight,’ and says ‘Belt up, you old faggot,’ for the very first time.
Hairdressers rarely beat about the bush either. ‘Such pretty hair madam must have had …’ they murmur, ‘before it faded.’
I think my moment of truth came when I dropped into the chemists for some face cream. It is bad enough to have a deaf chemist’s assistant (poor soul, why ever didn’t she take up greengrocery or dry cleaning?) but to have to shout: ‘Can I have another tube of Over-Forty Cream?’ is pushing back the veils of mystery a bit too far, even for those of us with small, blabbermouth sons who tell anybody anything anyway.
My almost teenage daughter, on the other hand, means well. ‘Don’t mind me saying this, Mummy,’ she starts diplomatically. And I learn, from the talk they’ve just had at school on make-up, that not only is my eye-liner old hat but I’ve got to smear pinkish stuff over and under the lids to really make the scene.
Piggy-eyed but trendy I gaze bleakly into shop windows. A fifteen-year-old policeman strolls past. I dive into a boutique before he offers to help me across the road. Immediately my ears wax over – protection against the sonic boom of the latest disc which has come a long long way from Jack Jackson’s Record Round-Up. My pupils meanwhile are opening at widest aperture to compensate for the boutique’s midnight-blue walls, floor and ceiling. A glimmer of Lurex catches my eye through the gloom, and I’m in luck – it fits. I glide off to the next party, a shining, ageless, happy creature.
‘Tell me,’ says an earnest young two-inch strip of face between waterfalls of hair. ‘From your long experience, how does marriage rate as an institution?’
Groping for a seat and for words to describe my institutional life, I find myself looking across at my husband. There appear to be about six terribly young women wound around him, all helping him to light his pipe. They don’t seem to mind the disgusting bubbly noises it makes, nor the fact that little black, composty lumps are floating out and landing damply in all directions. I knew I should have discouraged him from growing that Viva Zapata moustache.
Later I ask some of my contemporaries how they feel about life and marriage now that we are – er – middlin’ young.
‘It’s all this permissiveness that gets me down,’ sighs one pent-up soul. ‘When I think what I’ve missed!’
‘Oh yes,’ chimes in another. ‘It’s all very well being told that virtue is its own reward but I’m reaching the stage when I need a few rakish memories to get me through the day.’
‘Well, I just love to take a back seat now and to watch the youngsters enjoying themselves,’ says another. This little gem stuns us all into silence.
‘Personally,’ says a lugubrious voice from the corner, ‘I’ve never really got over the shock of marrying Prince Charming and watching him turn back into a frog.’
‘I’ve taken to carrying a hip flask,’ admits a cheery, pinkish little woman. With various others it is good works, gardening, going blonde, haute cuisine and weight-watching.
For me, I think I’ll start laying a few foundations to see me through into a stylish old age. It may seem a long way off at the moment, but, at the rate momentum is gathering itself lately, I shall be there waving my pension book at chiropodists and cinema managers before you can say ‘Phyllosan’.
I once heard old age described as a crystallization of all that has gone before. If this is so then perhaps it isn’t too soon for any of us to start weeding out our funny little ways. I certainly don’t want to hear any future grandchildren saying:
‘That’s my granny – that one over there drinking her liniment and singing bawdy songs.’ Nor: ‘For heaven’s sake, don’t mention the word bowels or she’ll be off again.’ Nor even: ‘Oh, do come off that trapeze, Gran. We all know about you and your Bio-Strath.’
No, I rather like the idea of a picturesque old age with lace at the throat and long purple tea-gowns. ‘Come sit by me,’ I shall say, resting a thin, freckled hand on assorted curly heads. ‘I want you to have this.’ And I shall slip a couple of pearl-and-emerald trinkets and a cameo or two into little chubby fists. Well, actually they may have to make do with the op-art scatter pins and my big plastic Habitat key ring, but it makes a gracious picture, all the same.
In the meantime I think I’ll just squeeze back into my Lurex, fill my pores with a good blob of Over-Forty Cream and away we go for one more shimmy before it’s too late!