‘No,’ I said rebelliously. ‘They are stunted by grief and will be midgets for the rest of their lives.’
Jeremy has clearly never read any Zen books and doesn’t know about just being there, and letting the other person be there, just as they are. But for a split second, he stopped the bluster and we just were there as we were, which was: extremely sad about the same thing. Then he coughed and started again as if nothing had happened.
‘Come on! Voddy and tonic? Let’s take your coat. You’re looking very trim!’
He ushered me into the familiar sitting room and Magda waved cheerily from the drinks table. Magda, who I met at Bangor University, is actually my oldest friend. I looked around at all the faces I’d known since my early twenties, once the original Sloane Rangers, older now. All the couples who seemed to get married like a line of falling dominoes when they were thirty-one, still together: Cosmo and Woney, Pony and Hugo, Johnny and Mufti. And there was the same sense I’d had for all that time – of being a duck out of water, unable to join in what they were talking about because I was at a different stage of life, even though I was the same age. It was as though there had been a seismic timeshift and my life was happening years behind theirs, in the wrong way.
‘Oh, Bridget! Jolly good to see you. Goodness, you’ve lost weight. How are you?’
Then there was the sudden flash in the eyes, the remembering of the whole widowhood thing: ‘How ARE the children? How are they doing?’
Not so Cosmo, Woney’s husband, a successful, confident-though-egg-shaped fund manager, who came charging up like a blunderbuss.
‘So! Bridget! Still on your own? You’re looking very chipper. When are we going to get you married off again?’
‘Cosmo!’ said Magda indignantly. ‘Zip it.’
One advantage of widowhood is that – unlike being single in your thirties, which, because it is ostensibly all your own fault, allows Smug Marrieds to say anything they like – it does usually introduce some element of tact. Unless, of course, you’re Cosmo.
‘Well, it’s been long enough now, hasn’t it?’ he crashed on. ‘Can’t carry on wearing widow’s weeds for ever.’
‘Yes, but the trouble is—’
Woney joined in. ‘It’s very hard for middle-aged women who find themselves single.’
‘Please don’t say “middle-aged”,’ I purred, trying to imitate Talitha.
‘. . . I mean, look at Binko Carruthers. He’s no oil painting. But the second Rosemary left him he was inundated with women! Inundated! Throwing themselves at him.’
‘Hurling themselves,’ said Hugo enthusiastically. ‘Dinners, theatre tickets. Life of Riley.’
‘Yes, but they’re all “of a Certain Age”, aren’t they?’ said Johnny.
Grrr. ‘Of a Certain Age’ is even worse than ‘middle-aged’ with its patronizing, only-ever-applied-to-women insinuations.
‘Meaning?’ said Woney.
‘Well, you know,’ Cosmo was bludgeoning on. ‘Chap gets a new lease of life, he’s going to go for something younger, isn’t he? Plump and fecund and—’