Fifty Is Not a Four-Letter Word
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Synopsis
As Hope Lyndhurst-Steele approaches her 50th birthday, although she "has it all"--top magazine job, wonderful husband, loving son, many friends--fifty still feels like a four-letter word. But she doesn't know just how low she can go. When she returns to the office after her holiday break, she's informed by senior management that the "having it all" woman is OUT--and Hope's out along with her. As she starts spending her days at home, her relationship with her usually patient husband Jack starts to become strained, and her teenage son is more interested in chasing after the local trashy single mom than spending his last year at home with his own mother. And Hope's own mother, who she never got along with, has cheerily announced that she's got six months left to live. Hope is relieved when a solo trip to Paris wakes up her long-dormant libido, but when she returns, she finds that her husband is giving her more space than she'd like--he's moved out. As Hope wonders if she'll be able to make it to fifty-one with her sanity and her family intact, she discovers some interesting truths about herself and her age--and even if 50 is not the new 30, it could be that the best is yet to come.
Release date: February 14, 2009
Publisher: 5 Spot
Print pages: 372
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Fifty Is Not a Four-Letter Word
Linda Kelsey
MAY 2003
Just as I was about to get it right, at the very moment I knew we were on the road to recovery, Jack walked out. I’d just gotten
home from three days in Paris, three days that had changed me in ways I couldn’t possibly have predicted. Olly had gone upstairs
to do some last-minute revision for his A levels. Or so he said. His sudden studiousness, even at this eleventh hour, was
suspicious. More likely, he’d gone upstairs to get away from me. Or to download songs onto his iPod. Or to surf for porn.
Or to do whatever eighteen-year-olds do behind the closed door of their bedroom. I’m being unkind. But then we had just had
a major row. I’m not sure who started it.
I’d planned the seduction of my husband of twenty years all the way from Gare du Nord to Waterloo. As soon as I’d cleared
away the dishes, my femme-fatale act would begin. I was already tingling.
Jack was hovering.
“What is it, Jack?” I asked, looking up over my shoulder from the saucepan I was scrubbing. “You look like a kid in nursery
school, trying to catch the teacher’s attention. Too timid to speak, are we?” I grinned and chucked him mockingly under the
chin with my rubber glove, depositing soap suds on his stubble.
I knew instantly it was the wrong thing to have done. I had been planning to seduce him, not eat him alive.
“Well spotted, Hope, that’s exactly how you make me feel.”
“But I was joking, Jack.”
“Maybe you were, but I’m not.” Jack brushed away the suds with the back of his hand and breathed in deeply, as though bracing
himself for a blow.
And then he let me have it. “I can’t take it anymore, Hope. I can’t take you anymore. Not your cynicism. Not your selfishness. Not your belief that you’re the only woman in the universe who has had
to endure the humiliation of turning fifty. Or your self-pity. Or your sniping at me. Or the way you sabotage yourself with
Olly. Or how you think you can challenge your mother to explain fifty years of bad parenting in a single afternoon, just because
you’re in the mood for an answer. And the fact that you freeze whenever I come near you. For the first time in our lives together,
you’ve had six full months of opportunity to make it right between us. But it was all too much effort for you. Well, now it’s
all too much effort for me. I’ve had enough. It was never any secret that all these years I’ve supported you more than you’ve
supported me. But I didn’t mind any of that. Because despite your success, you needed boosting far more than I ever did. But
I’ve had it. That’s it. Finished. I’m moving out.”
“Jack—”
“No, Hope, not now, I’m too weary to allow this to escalate into another row.”
He looked weary. So weary. Weary, ashen and old. For the first time, Jack, my rock, fifty-two and as fit as a man of thirty, looked old.
“There’s a small flat above the clinic, and it’s available, and that’s where I’m going,” he went on.
“Please, Jack, please, just one thing. Does Olly know?”
“Yes, Hope, he does know.”
“And?”
“And he doesn’t like it, but he understands.”
“But that’s unforgivable. How could you tell him before you’ve spoken to me about it? Before we’ve had a chance to discuss
it?”
“That’s typical, Hope. I tell you I’m leaving, and you’re concerned only about who comes first in the pecking order. It’s
irrelevant. If I could actually speak to you about anything at all without it turning into a row or a monologue about how
sorry you feel for yourself, then we’d never have gotten to this point.”
I turned away for a moment and stared into the sink, as though the grease floating on the surface of the water between the
suds might provide an explanation.
“Jack, is there someone else?”
But Jack had already left the room.
What use now for the Sabbia Rosa lingerie I’d bought on the Rue des Saints-Pères? I tried to give the saucepan my full attention,
scrubbing at it with steel wool. With slow deliberation, I lifted the sopping scourer from the sink, squeezed it free of water
and soap, and began to drag it along the inside of my left arm, bare except for the rubber glove. Again and again, back and
forth, I scraped it along the soft skin of my inner arm, watched the scratches and the teeny pinpricks of blood appear. Then
I leaned back over the sink and retched, vomiting chicken and ratatouille into the already unctuous water. My head was too
heavy to lift. I don’t know how long I stayed in that position, watching one tiny and forlorn tear after another plop into
the debris, plop, plop, a drop at a time, like a tap in need of a new washer.
Did I deserve this? Looking back over the past six months, I think perhaps I did . . .
FIVE MONTHS EARLIER, NEW YEAR’S DAY 2003, LATE AT NIGHT
He’s on me and in me. If a Peeping Tom up a ladder were to shine a torch through the window of our bedroom, he would think
he’d struck gold. Hope Lyndhurst-Steele and Jack Steele, unmistakably mid-coitus. But he’d be wrong. Appearances can be deceptive.
I’m not mid-anything. Only Jack is laboring away. Well, I suppose I’m doing something. I’m thinking, after all. But my mind—as so often these days—is elsewhere. My body has been embalmed, while my brain is turbo-charged.
A question keeps forming and re-forming in my head. IS . . . THIS . . . IT? IS . . . THIS . . . REALLY . . . IT?
And I don’t mean just the sex, although that matters. It matters a lot. I mean my whole life. Why does it feel so—over? So far, so very good. And now, suddenly, so over. I have no right to feel this jaded.
I really must try to concentrate. Even after almost twenty years, Jack’s a sensitive lover, and he can always spot when I’m
not paying attention. But with any luck, he won’t notice the fractional shifting of my head that allows me to see the LED
on my alarm clock, illuminating the time at 11:53. It’s a matter of honor—Jack’s honor, that is—that we make love on my birthday,
which happens to be today, January 1. With only seven minutes to go until it’s over, he has a deadline to meet. Sex on special
occasions is one of Jack’s quirks. My birthday. His birthday. The anniversary of the day we met. The anniversary of the day
our son was conceived (Jack is very precise with dates). Our wedding anniversary. Christmas, Jewish New Year, Chinese New
Year, and Divali. Well, the Jewish New Year, anyway. And quite a few times in between. But who’s counting?
I’ve been dreading this birthday for months. Now that it’s almost over, instead of feeling the relief that should come from
realizing that any given birthday is simply another day, I feel increasingly agitated, with little knots of nervousness gnawing
at my solar plexus. As though something dreadful is about to happen. Something in addition to the one dreadful thing that’s
already happened.
I forgot to mention the F-word. The F-word. Not that F-word. How about F is for fuming? F is for flabbergasted. F is for effing fifty! And now, bitch that I am,
F is for flaccid. Jack clocked what was going on, as I knew he would. Making love to an embalmed woman is few men’s idea of
fun. And necrophilia definitely doesn’t feature in Jack’s erotic repertoire.
He’s withdrawing. I’ve long since withdrawn. Jack looks at me, more quizzical than cross. “And where do you go to, my lovely,
when you’re alone in your bed?” Peter Sarstedt. Jack’s a sucker for a good lyric.
“I’m sorry, darling,” I reply. “The party. A new year. Being fifty. Wondering where on earth we go from here. I guess it’s
all been a bit much. But you’ve been brilliant.”
“Never mind, old girl, you’ll soon get used to it.” He kisses me gently on the cheek and squeezes my hand briefly as he rolls
over to his side of the bed. “Sleep tight.”
I turn onto my side, too. We’re back to back, with a couple of feet between us. Or maybe the Atlantic Ocean. But it’s not
Jack, it’s me. It’s my fault, this growing gulf. I am so tired. I fall into an uneasy sleep.
THE PREVIOUS MONTH, DECEMBER 2002
The party had been Jack’s idea. “What’s to celebrate?” I’d countered curtly when he suggested it. Honestly, I didn’t used
to be this grumpy.
“Come on, Hope, don’t be such a misery. Just think of it as a New Year’s Eve party, which it will be, a not–birthday party
that happens to begin the night before your birthday. By the time it gets to midnight, everyone will be too drunk to remember
that half-a-century Hope has become eligible for HRT.”
“It’s a blessing you never planned a career as a salesman. You wouldn’t earn a penny in commission.”
“Okay, look at it this way. If we have a really big bash, Claire will come from Australia and Saskia from Rome. And so will
the rest of the clan. I could take you on a cruise, if you’d prefer.”
“A cruise! Very funny. I’d rather slit my throat. In fact, I’d rather slit your throat.”
Jack was grinning, so I knew he didn’t really mean it about the cruise. What clinched it as far as the party was concerned
was the thought of all my émigré best friends turning up at the same time. I’m only moderately political, but there are two
things that could get me signed up for an anti-globalization campaign. One: the fact that Starbucks cappuccino sucks; the
other: that so many of my friends have abandoned England for a better life elsewhere. Thank God for e-mail.
But I think it went deeper than that, this agreeing to a party that I didn’t really want. I’m hardly the doormat type, so
usually, when I say no, I mean it. The weird thing is, I’m not sure what I want anymore. Over these past few months, I’ve
been suffering from a kind of mental vertigo. A sense of spinning, of disequilibrium, but entirely in the mind.
Take the business of confidence, for example. I spent the first thirty years of my life trying to acquire some confidence.
Feeling the fear and doing it anyway. Taking courses to learn how to be assertive. Forcing myself to walk into crowded rooms alone without running straight out
again. I spent the next almost twenty years enjoying that hard-won self-assurance. And now? Gone. Kaput. Like I’m the victim
of a smash-and-grab attack. How on earth did this happen? If I’m being truthful, I can’t even decide in the morning what to
wear for work or what to cook for dinner. As for my job, my precious career, I keep wondering if I’m good enough. And if I
even care that much anymore. Can I blame it all on the big 5-0?
“Officer,” I want to shout at every passing policeman. “I’ve been robbed.”
“Sorry to hear that, ma’am,” I imagine the reply. “What did they take?”
“Just my confidence, Officer. Probably not very valuable, as far as you’re concerned. But it meant a lot to me.”
At least I still had the wherewithal to insist on conditions. I refused to allow any mention of the birthday on the invites,
knowing all along it was a hopeless cause and Jack was bound to be briefing everyone behind the scenes. But I did make him
promise no speeches, no cake, no male strippergrams. And he’s a man of his word.
“Jack, why are you so keen to have a party?”
“I think it will do you good. Remind you that life’s for living. You haven’t been yourself for months.”
Exactly. Jack got it in one. I’ve forgotten who myself is.
“You’re right, my love. If we’re going to do it, let’s pull out all the stops and make it the best party ever,” I said. “After
all, it’s the only . . . the only”—I was going to say the only fiftieth birthday I would ever have, but the words wouldn’t
come out—“the only New Year’s Eve party we’re likely to have for some time,” I finished feebly.
“Champagne,” said Jack, saving me.
“Laurent-Perrier pink champagne,” I countered, perking up a bit.
“Martinis,” Jack added. “With olives.”
“Cosmopolitans for the girls,” I suggested, practicing a pout but sounding more like Peggy Mitchell from the Square than Samantha
on Sex and the City. Still, I was getting into the swing of it.
“Mojitos,” interjected a gravelly voice entering the kitchen. “I’ll do the cocktails. And if it means free booze, James and
Ravi will probably help, too. Just so long as when things get really gross—like by the time the hall is clogged up with walkers—you
don’t mind us saying good night to the corpses and moving on.”
Olly loped over and around me, wrapping me from behind in his skinny arms and planting a big smacker of a kiss on the side
of my neck. My darling boy. Seventeen years old and six feet to my five feet seven (unless I’ve shrunk a bit lately, which
isn’t beyond the realm of possibility). He’s still capable of unsolicited hugs and affection when I’m not annoying the hell
out of him, which, according to Olly, is most of the time.
“Mmm, talking of Ravi,” I mused, “I feel a theme coming on. There’s certainly not enough room in the house, so we’ll need
a tent. A tent with heaters. Otherwise we’ll all freeze to death. Although, come to think of it, preserving our increasingly
ancient friends in a cryology experiment might not be such a bad idea.”
“Yeah, absolutely fascinating, but what’s cryology, and what’s all this got to do with Ravi?”
“Well, what I really fancy is a cross between a Moroccan souk and Monsoon Wedding. I can picture it. The whole tent lined with beautiful jewel-toned fabrics, like something out of The Arabian Nights . . .”
“Look, I don’t want to be rude or anything, but I’ve places to go, people to see. Do you think you could get to the point?”
“I was only wondering if Ravi’s mum might know where to get cheap sari material.”
“Muuum!” Olly changes moods as easily as flicking a light switch. “I do NOT, do you hear, NOT, want you ringing Ravi’s mum.”
“But I thought I might invite her to the party.”
“You hardly know her, for fuck’s sake!”
“Olly, language check.” Jack speaking.
“She swears all the time. What do you call it, Dad? Swearing like a trooper? You guys are such hypocrites. And don’t you have
enough friends already without getting together with my mates’ mums all the time? It’s so creepy. I know you sit around yabbering
about us, trying to gather information to use against us.”
My eyes fixed on the impressive array of buffed and sharpened kitchen knives that dangle from the magnetic metal strip behind
the cooker. Did Medea commit infanticide with a pointy knife? Or was it a blunt instrument?
“Forget it, Olly.” I was trying desperately not to lose it. “I’ll sort it on my own. Forget I even mentioned it.”
“Anything to eat?” asked the boy, flicking the switch again. “I’m starved . . . Shit, I’ve just realized something. You’re
going to be fifty, aren’t you? Fifty! That’s what this party is really all about. We’re going to have to all club together
and buy you a face-lift. Last night James and I were watching this hilarious program, Makeover Mayhem or something. Apparently, it’s what every fifty-year-old wants. A new face. How much do these things cost, anyway? Can you
afford it? Will I still get to go on my gap year? You did promise you’d pay half. Will you look surprised all the time, like
Anne Robinson?”
“And start telling me that I’m the weakest link?” added Jack, sounding somewhat rueful.
I kicked Olly playfully in the shins, but when he screeched, “Ow, that really hurt,” in a way that suggested it really did
hurt, I found myself smiling.
• • •
My being born on January 1 is a mixed blessing, depending on whom you’re talking to. My mother, for example, says New Year’s
Eve is her worst day of the year, because when everyone else is celebrating, she is reliving the nightmare of giving birth
to me. If you were to go to a party on New Year’s Eve where my mother happened to be, you’d spot her straight off: She’d be
loudly and aggressively subjecting anyone within earshot to the story of my undignified entry into the world. Later, she’d
be the one curled up in a fetal position in the corner, swigging gin straight from the bottle, getting more maudlin by the
minute. You can imagine why relations between me and my mother sometimes tend toward the frosty. This year, to my relief,
she and Dad are going to South Africa for Christmas and staying for the New Year, so at least we’re spared her presence. My
father’s presence, by contrast, is always pure pleasure. He’s the longest-suffering and cheeriest person I’ve ever met. He
still adores her and what he chivalrously refers to as her “engaging eccentricity.” Even after fifty-five years of marriage.
I don’t get it, but neither would I dare to question it. It’s not my business.
• • •
After twenty-seven hours in labor, by ten p.m. on December 31, 1952, Jenny Lyndhurst wasn’t the slightest bit interested in
the symbolic nature of the date. She didn’t give a damn whether her offspring arrived before midnight, as the clock struck
twelve, or never. The midwife, who’d been hoping to get off her shift at ten P.M. in order to join a group of nurses and doctors for the countdown on the hospital roof, with its panoramic views of the Thames,
could barely loosen my mother’s viselike grip on her arm.
“You can’t leave me, not now,” my mother wailed. “I’m going to die if this isn’t over soon.”
Mary, the midwife, who was caring and Catholic and Irish, didn’t have the heart to abandon my belligerent, albeit distressed,
mother. As Big Ben began to ring out for midnight, Mary exclaimed, “You’re ten centimeters dilated! We’ll soon be there, Mrs.
Lyndhurst. It’s time to push; start pushing, Mrs. Lyndhurst. We’re nearly there.”
An hour later, Mrs. Lyndhurst was still pushing and still wailing and still ranting between wails about how she’d never wanted
to have a second child and how Abe, my soon-to-be father, was to blame, and how she was going to have her tubes tied the minute
the baby was out, and how all midwives were sadists. Not that any of it mattered, she insisted, because she was about to die
anyway.
By this time the doctor had arrived—from the roof, presumably—wearing a silly paper hat on his head and streamers around his
neck.
“Get out of here,” Mrs. Lyndhurst screamed. “Mary, the alarm, get this intruder out of here.”
“Calm down, Mrs. Lyndhurst, and let me have a look,” said the duty obstetrician. “Do we want to get this baby out now or not?”
He bent down to look closer between my mother’s writhing, ricocheting legs, jerking his head back, then forward, then back
again to avoid being hit in the face by a flailing limb.
At the very moment he was thinking of forceps, Jenny Lyndhurst felt something rip her flesh apart. She let out a low, guttural
groan that sounded nothing like the noise a human being makes. The crown broke through, and a bloody, big-headed baby slithered
out of her, caught in time by the triumphant doctor. He beamed, as though he and he alone had been responsible for the successful
outcome.
“A beautiful baby girl, Mrs. Lyndhurst. My sincerest congratulations. One of the first babies of the new year, born midway
through the twentieth century, at the dawning of a new era of peace and prosperity. What a blessing.”
If she’d had the strength, my mother would have strangled the patronizing popinjay. Instead, she snapped breathlessly, “Cut
the sermon, Doctor. I’d like to see my baby, if it’s all right with you.” As I was lifted and placed on her belly, a wrung-out,
torn-asunder Jenny Lyndhurst relented a little. “In the spirit of the good doctor’s words, I name you Hope. As in Hope for
the future. As in Hope that I never, ever have to go through this again.”
At which point my father, who’d been pacing and intermittently peeking around the curtain for what seemed like days, walked
in clutching the hand of a sleepy, confused, curly-haired two-and-a-half-year-old in a smocked dress and patent-leather shoes
and with a big ribbon at the side of her head. My sister, Sarah. She, in turn, was clutching a one-eyed teddy bear. Before
my father could say a word, my mother was off. “You’ve no idea what I’ve been through. And I told you not to bring her. This
is no place for a child. Why isn’t she at her grandmother’s?”
“My poor darling, you must be quite exhausted,” he replied, refusing to be riled. “But look at the little mite, she’s perfect.
Look, Sarah, your lovely little sister.” Sarah took one look at me—still attached to the umbilical cord, still smeared with
slime—and began to scream.
“Congratulations, Mr. Lyndhurst, but you’re a little premature,” said Mary sternly. “All is well. But it’s nearly three o’clock
in the morning, and Sarah should be in bed. According to hospital rules, you shouldn’t be here at all, and certainly not with
your daughter. It disturbs the other patients at this time of night. There’s clearing up to do. And then Mrs. Lyndhurst and
baby Hope need some sleep. So please go home and come back in the morning.”
“Hope? I never . . . Oh, never mind. Hope, that’s the prettiest name I ever heard. Next to Sarah, that is.”
Sarah’s head was buried in my father’s overcoat. “Baby horrid. Mummy horrid,” she sobbed. “Daddy and Sarah go home.”
My dad smiled on regardless. He says he fell in love with both of us girls from the first second he saw us. I’ve never once
had reason to doubt him.
• • •
Unlike my mother, I revel in having been born on January 1 around halfway through the twentieth century. It kind of puts me
in the thick of things, gives my birthday an extra significance, a bit of historical context, as my dad would say. Okay, this
year it has a significance I could have done without, but as a rule, it has worked in my favor. Mostly, I’ve chimed rather
well with the decades. As I came in, rationing was about to go out, and by the time Harold Macmillan, in 1957, told Britons
that they’d “never had it so good,” that was true of my family. I managed to squeeze in about five minutes of swinging at
the end of the ’60s; I marched to a faint-hearted feminist tune in the ’70s; in the ’80s I became a working mum and soared
to the peak of my profession, although I never voted for Margaret Thatcher; and in the ’90s . . . what did I do in the ’90s?
I just carried on doing what I’d done in the ’80s, minus the shoulder pads. Oh, and I took up yoga, to which I was totally
unsuited, because my head steadfastly refuses to unclutter even when I’m asleep. My fight-or-flight mechanism is on constant
red alert. I’m not even sure I see the point of relaxing. It’s not doing stuff that makes me anxious. Lying on a mat with someone else’s feet too close to my nose, trying to imagine the gentle
swish of waves beside the seashore, makes my breathing go all funny—fast and short and shallow, instead of slow and deep and
regular.
It seems to me that I’ve gone from zero to fifty in about the same time as it takes a Ferrari Testarossa. One second I was
slithering out from between my ill-tempered mother’s legs, the next, whoosh, here I am weighing up whether to bleach or laser
my incipient mustache. I don’t care what those inane glossy magazines tell you—oops, I nearly neglected to mention that I
am editor in chief of one of those very same glossy magazines—but fifty is not fabulous, it’s not fun, and it definitely isn’t
funny.
I do love giving parties, though, and I would have been thrilled to be giving one on New Year’s Eve if not for the F-word.
Jack and I sat down to do the invites under various headings. First, Family.
“That’s easy,” said Jack, “what with my parents both being dead and yours on holiday in Cape Town.” I ignored him and wrote
down my sister, Sarah, her husband, William, and their three girls, Jessie, Amanda, and Sam.
“Don’t forget my delightful sister,” Jack continued.
“As if I could,” I replied glumly, adding Anita to the list. Anita, who hates me, and her husband, Rupert, who hates everybody,
so at least I don’t have to take it personally. Next up my cousin Mike, who loves me, and his new boyfriend, a ruggedly handsome
Slav named Stanko whom I’m prepared to love, but only once Mike tells me he is definitely The One.
Then Best Friends, mine, Jack’s, and Olly’s (I’m already resigned to the fact that Olly and his pals will exit the party at
the first opportunity), with marvelous, maddening, unpredictable Maddy—Dr. M. to her adoring patients—right at the top of
the BF list; then the aforementioned BFs abroad. There are about ten of them in various parts of the globe, and they book
flights as casually as they make restaurant reservations.
After that came the second tier. Colleagues and bosses, school mums and dads (Olly would have gone ballistic if he’d seen
this category on the list), old school friends whom I see once a year, neighbors so they won’t complain about the noise, plus
one set of neighbors who have been promoted to New Best Friend status. (Original BFs, like Pringles Original or original Branston
pickles, need to have been around for at least twenty years to qualify; NBFs can be made in a week, although you’ll never
love them as much as your BFs.) What is it with me? I may be pushing fifty, but I still think like a small child. Fifty going
on four. That’s part of the problem, I suppose. When the numbers reached eighty-five, Jack declared a halt.
The guest list sorted, next came the question of food. If there’s anything that marks me out as Jewish—apart from hair that
frizzes at the mere mention of the word “moisture”—it’s my attitude about food. It’s one of the many reasons Jack’s sister,
Anita, hates me. I do food all the time, and in copious quantities. My fridge is so full it keeps springing back open the
second I shut it. Once a frozen chicken fell out and landed on Anita’s toe, and it broke—the toe, not the chicken. Some people
have second homes on the Costa del Sol; mine’s on the Finchley Road at Waitrose. Quite a hike from there to the coast.
In the almost twenty years Jack and I have been together, we have been to Anita and Rupert’s place for dinner maybe five times.
Anita has been to our place more like five hundred times. She thinks I invite her to spite her. It’s me who does Christmas,
too. Jack’s a Christian (lapsed), and Olly is whatever suits him on any given day. It’s not that I particularly like cooking,
but for me, friends around a table groaning with food (even if the food has come straight from the deli) is one of life’s
great pleasures.
So the food was going to have to be fantastic.
I rang Pam. “Pam? Fancy doing a New Year’s Eve party for eighty-five?”
A former junior editor on my magazine who left journalism only six months ago to become a caterer, Pam was perhaps a bit of
a risk. But she deserved a boost, and if all went well, she’d make lots of new contacts.
“Food stations, darling,” she insisted, “so right for you and so right for now.” I could swear Pam never called anyone “darling”
before she went into the party-planning business. And I didn’t have a clue what food stations were.
“What exactly—”
“Grazing areas. Food stations are strategically placed so you can pick up delicious morsels of sustenance—some hot, so. . .
Just as I was about to get it right, at the very moment I knew we were on the road to recovery, Jack walked out. I’d just gotten
home from three days in Paris, three days that had changed me in ways I couldn’t possibly have predicted. Olly had gone upstairs
to do some last-minute revision for his A levels. Or so he said. His sudden studiousness, even at this eleventh hour, was
suspicious. More likely, he’d gone upstairs to get away from me. Or to download songs onto his iPod. Or to surf for porn.
Or to do whatever eighteen-year-olds do behind the closed door of their bedroom. I’m being unkind. But then we had just had
a major row. I’m not sure who started it.
I’d planned the seduction of my husband of twenty years all the way from Gare du Nord to Waterloo. As soon as I’d cleared
away the dishes, my femme-fatale act would begin. I was already tingling.
Jack was hovering.
“What is it, Jack?” I asked, looking up over my shoulder from the saucepan I was scrubbing. “You look like a kid in nursery
school, trying to catch the teacher’s attention. Too timid to speak, are we?” I grinned and chucked him mockingly under the
chin with my rubber glove, depositing soap suds on his stubble.
I knew instantly it was the wrong thing to have done. I had been planning to seduce him, not eat him alive.
“Well spotted, Hope, that’s exactly how you make me feel.”
“But I was joking, Jack.”
“Maybe you were, but I’m not.” Jack brushed away the suds with the back of his hand and breathed in deeply, as though bracing
himself for a blow.
And then he let me have it. “I can’t take it anymore, Hope. I can’t take you anymore. Not your cynicism. Not your selfishness. Not your belief that you’re the only woman in the universe who has had
to endure the humiliation of turning fifty. Or your self-pity. Or your sniping at me. Or the way you sabotage yourself with
Olly. Or how you think you can challenge your mother to explain fifty years of bad parenting in a single afternoon, just because
you’re in the mood for an answer. And the fact that you freeze whenever I come near you. For the first time in our lives together,
you’ve had six full months of opportunity to make it right between us. But it was all too much effort for you. Well, now it’s
all too much effort for me. I’ve had enough. It was never any secret that all these years I’ve supported you more than you’ve
supported me. But I didn’t mind any of that. Because despite your success, you needed boosting far more than I ever did. But
I’ve had it. That’s it. Finished. I’m moving out.”
“Jack—”
“No, Hope, not now, I’m too weary to allow this to escalate into another row.”
He looked weary. So weary. Weary, ashen and old. For the first time, Jack, my rock, fifty-two and as fit as a man of thirty, looked old.
“There’s a small flat above the clinic, and it’s available, and that’s where I’m going,” he went on.
“Please, Jack, please, just one thing. Does Olly know?”
“Yes, Hope, he does know.”
“And?”
“And he doesn’t like it, but he understands.”
“But that’s unforgivable. How could you tell him before you’ve spoken to me about it? Before we’ve had a chance to discuss
it?”
“That’s typical, Hope. I tell you I’m leaving, and you’re concerned only about who comes first in the pecking order. It’s
irrelevant. If I could actually speak to you about anything at all without it turning into a row or a monologue about how
sorry you feel for yourself, then we’d never have gotten to this point.”
I turned away for a moment and stared into the sink, as though the grease floating on the surface of the water between the
suds might provide an explanation.
“Jack, is there someone else?”
But Jack had already left the room.
What use now for the Sabbia Rosa lingerie I’d bought on the Rue des Saints-Pères? I tried to give the saucepan my full attention,
scrubbing at it with steel wool. With slow deliberation, I lifted the sopping scourer from the sink, squeezed it free of water
and soap, and began to drag it along the inside of my left arm, bare except for the rubber glove. Again and again, back and
forth, I scraped it along the soft skin of my inner arm, watched the scratches and the teeny pinpricks of blood appear. Then
I leaned back over the sink and retched, vomiting chicken and ratatouille into the already unctuous water. My head was too
heavy to lift. I don’t know how long I stayed in that position, watching one tiny and forlorn tear after another plop into
the debris, plop, plop, a drop at a time, like a tap in need of a new washer.
Did I deserve this? Looking back over the past six months, I think perhaps I did . . .
FIVE MONTHS EARLIER, NEW YEAR’S DAY 2003, LATE AT NIGHT
He’s on me and in me. If a Peeping Tom up a ladder were to shine a torch through the window of our bedroom, he would think
he’d struck gold. Hope Lyndhurst-Steele and Jack Steele, unmistakably mid-coitus. But he’d be wrong. Appearances can be deceptive.
I’m not mid-anything. Only Jack is laboring away. Well, I suppose I’m doing something. I’m thinking, after all. But my mind—as so often these days—is elsewhere. My body has been embalmed, while my brain is turbo-charged.
A question keeps forming and re-forming in my head. IS . . . THIS . . . IT? IS . . . THIS . . . REALLY . . . IT?
And I don’t mean just the sex, although that matters. It matters a lot. I mean my whole life. Why does it feel so—over? So far, so very good. And now, suddenly, so over. I have no right to feel this jaded.
I really must try to concentrate. Even after almost twenty years, Jack’s a sensitive lover, and he can always spot when I’m
not paying attention. But with any luck, he won’t notice the fractional shifting of my head that allows me to see the LED
on my alarm clock, illuminating the time at 11:53. It’s a matter of honor—Jack’s honor, that is—that we make love on my birthday,
which happens to be today, January 1. With only seven minutes to go until it’s over, he has a deadline to meet. Sex on special
occasions is one of Jack’s quirks. My birthday. His birthday. The anniversary of the day we met. The anniversary of the day
our son was conceived (Jack is very precise with dates). Our wedding anniversary. Christmas, Jewish New Year, Chinese New
Year, and Divali. Well, the Jewish New Year, anyway. And quite a few times in between. But who’s counting?
I’ve been dreading this birthday for months. Now that it’s almost over, instead of feeling the relief that should come from
realizing that any given birthday is simply another day, I feel increasingly agitated, with little knots of nervousness gnawing
at my solar plexus. As though something dreadful is about to happen. Something in addition to the one dreadful thing that’s
already happened.
I forgot to mention the F-word. The F-word. Not that F-word. How about F is for fuming? F is for flabbergasted. F is for effing fifty! And now, bitch that I am,
F is for flaccid. Jack clocked what was going on, as I knew he would. Making love to an embalmed woman is few men’s idea of
fun. And necrophilia definitely doesn’t feature in Jack’s erotic repertoire.
He’s withdrawing. I’ve long since withdrawn. Jack looks at me, more quizzical than cross. “And where do you go to, my lovely,
when you’re alone in your bed?” Peter Sarstedt. Jack’s a sucker for a good lyric.
“I’m sorry, darling,” I reply. “The party. A new year. Being fifty. Wondering where on earth we go from here. I guess it’s
all been a bit much. But you’ve been brilliant.”
“Never mind, old girl, you’ll soon get used to it.” He kisses me gently on the cheek and squeezes my hand briefly as he rolls
over to his side of the bed. “Sleep tight.”
I turn onto my side, too. We’re back to back, with a couple of feet between us. Or maybe the Atlantic Ocean. But it’s not
Jack, it’s me. It’s my fault, this growing gulf. I am so tired. I fall into an uneasy sleep.
THE PREVIOUS MONTH, DECEMBER 2002
The party had been Jack’s idea. “What’s to celebrate?” I’d countered curtly when he suggested it. Honestly, I didn’t used
to be this grumpy.
“Come on, Hope, don’t be such a misery. Just think of it as a New Year’s Eve party, which it will be, a not–birthday party
that happens to begin the night before your birthday. By the time it gets to midnight, everyone will be too drunk to remember
that half-a-century Hope has become eligible for HRT.”
“It’s a blessing you never planned a career as a salesman. You wouldn’t earn a penny in commission.”
“Okay, look at it this way. If we have a really big bash, Claire will come from Australia and Saskia from Rome. And so will
the rest of the clan. I could take you on a cruise, if you’d prefer.”
“A cruise! Very funny. I’d rather slit my throat. In fact, I’d rather slit your throat.”
Jack was grinning, so I knew he didn’t really mean it about the cruise. What clinched it as far as the party was concerned
was the thought of all my émigré best friends turning up at the same time. I’m only moderately political, but there are two
things that could get me signed up for an anti-globalization campaign. One: the fact that Starbucks cappuccino sucks; the
other: that so many of my friends have abandoned England for a better life elsewhere. Thank God for e-mail.
But I think it went deeper than that, this agreeing to a party that I didn’t really want. I’m hardly the doormat type, so
usually, when I say no, I mean it. The weird thing is, I’m not sure what I want anymore. Over these past few months, I’ve
been suffering from a kind of mental vertigo. A sense of spinning, of disequilibrium, but entirely in the mind.
Take the business of confidence, for example. I spent the first thirty years of my life trying to acquire some confidence.
Feeling the fear and doing it anyway. Taking courses to learn how to be assertive. Forcing myself to walk into crowded rooms alone without running straight out
again. I spent the next almost twenty years enjoying that hard-won self-assurance. And now? Gone. Kaput. Like I’m the victim
of a smash-and-grab attack. How on earth did this happen? If I’m being truthful, I can’t even decide in the morning what to
wear for work or what to cook for dinner. As for my job, my precious career, I keep wondering if I’m good enough. And if I
even care that much anymore. Can I blame it all on the big 5-0?
“Officer,” I want to shout at every passing policeman. “I’ve been robbed.”
“Sorry to hear that, ma’am,” I imagine the reply. “What did they take?”
“Just my confidence, Officer. Probably not very valuable, as far as you’re concerned. But it meant a lot to me.”
At least I still had the wherewithal to insist on conditions. I refused to allow any mention of the birthday on the invites,
knowing all along it was a hopeless cause and Jack was bound to be briefing everyone behind the scenes. But I did make him
promise no speeches, no cake, no male strippergrams. And he’s a man of his word.
“Jack, why are you so keen to have a party?”
“I think it will do you good. Remind you that life’s for living. You haven’t been yourself for months.”
Exactly. Jack got it in one. I’ve forgotten who myself is.
“You’re right, my love. If we’re going to do it, let’s pull out all the stops and make it the best party ever,” I said. “After
all, it’s the only . . . the only”—I was going to say the only fiftieth birthday I would ever have, but the words wouldn’t
come out—“the only New Year’s Eve party we’re likely to have for some time,” I finished feebly.
“Champagne,” said Jack, saving me.
“Laurent-Perrier pink champagne,” I countered, perking up a bit.
“Martinis,” Jack added. “With olives.”
“Cosmopolitans for the girls,” I suggested, practicing a pout but sounding more like Peggy Mitchell from the Square than Samantha
on Sex and the City. Still, I was getting into the swing of it.
“Mojitos,” interjected a gravelly voice entering the kitchen. “I’ll do the cocktails. And if it means free booze, James and
Ravi will probably help, too. Just so long as when things get really gross—like by the time the hall is clogged up with walkers—you
don’t mind us saying good night to the corpses and moving on.”
Olly loped over and around me, wrapping me from behind in his skinny arms and planting a big smacker of a kiss on the side
of my neck. My darling boy. Seventeen years old and six feet to my five feet seven (unless I’ve shrunk a bit lately, which
isn’t beyond the realm of possibility). He’s still capable of unsolicited hugs and affection when I’m not annoying the hell
out of him, which, according to Olly, is most of the time.
“Mmm, talking of Ravi,” I mused, “I feel a theme coming on. There’s certainly not enough room in the house, so we’ll need
a tent. A tent with heaters. Otherwise we’ll all freeze to death. Although, come to think of it, preserving our increasingly
ancient friends in a cryology experiment might not be such a bad idea.”
“Yeah, absolutely fascinating, but what’s cryology, and what’s all this got to do with Ravi?”
“Well, what I really fancy is a cross between a Moroccan souk and Monsoon Wedding. I can picture it. The whole tent lined with beautiful jewel-toned fabrics, like something out of The Arabian Nights . . .”
“Look, I don’t want to be rude or anything, but I’ve places to go, people to see. Do you think you could get to the point?”
“I was only wondering if Ravi’s mum might know where to get cheap sari material.”
“Muuum!” Olly changes moods as easily as flicking a light switch. “I do NOT, do you hear, NOT, want you ringing Ravi’s mum.”
“But I thought I might invite her to the party.”
“You hardly know her, for fuck’s sake!”
“Olly, language check.” Jack speaking.
“She swears all the time. What do you call it, Dad? Swearing like a trooper? You guys are such hypocrites. And don’t you have
enough friends already without getting together with my mates’ mums all the time? It’s so creepy. I know you sit around yabbering
about us, trying to gather information to use against us.”
My eyes fixed on the impressive array of buffed and sharpened kitchen knives that dangle from the magnetic metal strip behind
the cooker. Did Medea commit infanticide with a pointy knife? Or was it a blunt instrument?
“Forget it, Olly.” I was trying desperately not to lose it. “I’ll sort it on my own. Forget I even mentioned it.”
“Anything to eat?” asked the boy, flicking the switch again. “I’m starved . . . Shit, I’ve just realized something. You’re
going to be fifty, aren’t you? Fifty! That’s what this party is really all about. We’re going to have to all club together
and buy you a face-lift. Last night James and I were watching this hilarious program, Makeover Mayhem or something. Apparently, it’s what every fifty-year-old wants. A new face. How much do these things cost, anyway? Can you
afford it? Will I still get to go on my gap year? You did promise you’d pay half. Will you look surprised all the time, like
Anne Robinson?”
“And start telling me that I’m the weakest link?” added Jack, sounding somewhat rueful.
I kicked Olly playfully in the shins, but when he screeched, “Ow, that really hurt,” in a way that suggested it really did
hurt, I found myself smiling.
• • •
My being born on January 1 is a mixed blessing, depending on whom you’re talking to. My mother, for example, says New Year’s
Eve is her worst day of the year, because when everyone else is celebrating, she is reliving the nightmare of giving birth
to me. If you were to go to a party on New Year’s Eve where my mother happened to be, you’d spot her straight off: She’d be
loudly and aggressively subjecting anyone within earshot to the story of my undignified entry into the world. Later, she’d
be the one curled up in a fetal position in the corner, swigging gin straight from the bottle, getting more maudlin by the
minute. You can imagine why relations between me and my mother sometimes tend toward the frosty. This year, to my relief,
she and Dad are going to South Africa for Christmas and staying for the New Year, so at least we’re spared her presence. My
father’s presence, by contrast, is always pure pleasure. He’s the longest-suffering and cheeriest person I’ve ever met. He
still adores her and what he chivalrously refers to as her “engaging eccentricity.” Even after fifty-five years of marriage.
I don’t get it, but neither would I dare to question it. It’s not my business.
• • •
After twenty-seven hours in labor, by ten p.m. on December 31, 1952, Jenny Lyndhurst wasn’t the slightest bit interested in
the symbolic nature of the date. She didn’t give a damn whether her offspring arrived before midnight, as the clock struck
twelve, or never. The midwife, who’d been hoping to get off her shift at ten P.M. in order to join a group of nurses and doctors for the countdown on the hospital roof, with its panoramic views of the Thames,
could barely loosen my mother’s viselike grip on her arm.
“You can’t leave me, not now,” my mother wailed. “I’m going to die if this isn’t over soon.”
Mary, the midwife, who was caring and Catholic and Irish, didn’t have the heart to abandon my belligerent, albeit distressed,
mother. As Big Ben began to ring out for midnight, Mary exclaimed, “You’re ten centimeters dilated! We’ll soon be there, Mrs.
Lyndhurst. It’s time to push; start pushing, Mrs. Lyndhurst. We’re nearly there.”
An hour later, Mrs. Lyndhurst was still pushing and still wailing and still ranting between wails about how she’d never wanted
to have a second child and how Abe, my soon-to-be father, was to blame, and how she was going to have her tubes tied the minute
the baby was out, and how all midwives were sadists. Not that any of it mattered, she insisted, because she was about to die
anyway.
By this time the doctor had arrived—from the roof, presumably—wearing a silly paper hat on his head and streamers around his
neck.
“Get out of here,” Mrs. Lyndhurst screamed. “Mary, the alarm, get this intruder out of here.”
“Calm down, Mrs. Lyndhurst, and let me have a look,” said the duty obstetrician. “Do we want to get this baby out now or not?”
He bent down to look closer between my mother’s writhing, ricocheting legs, jerking his head back, then forward, then back
again to avoid being hit in the face by a flailing limb.
At the very moment he was thinking of forceps, Jenny Lyndhurst felt something rip her flesh apart. She let out a low, guttural
groan that sounded nothing like the noise a human being makes. The crown broke through, and a bloody, big-headed baby slithered
out of her, caught in time by the triumphant doctor. He beamed, as though he and he alone had been responsible for the successful
outcome.
“A beautiful baby girl, Mrs. Lyndhurst. My sincerest congratulations. One of the first babies of the new year, born midway
through the twentieth century, at the dawning of a new era of peace and prosperity. What a blessing.”
If she’d had the strength, my mother would have strangled the patronizing popinjay. Instead, she snapped breathlessly, “Cut
the sermon, Doctor. I’d like to see my baby, if it’s all right with you.” As I was lifted and placed on her belly, a wrung-out,
torn-asunder Jenny Lyndhurst relented a little. “In the spirit of the good doctor’s words, I name you Hope. As in Hope for
the future. As in Hope that I never, ever have to go through this again.”
At which point my father, who’d been pacing and intermittently peeking around the curtain for what seemed like days, walked
in clutching the hand of a sleepy, confused, curly-haired two-and-a-half-year-old in a smocked dress and patent-leather shoes
and with a big ribbon at the side of her head. My sister, Sarah. She, in turn, was clutching a one-eyed teddy bear. Before
my father could say a word, my mother was off. “You’ve no idea what I’ve been through. And I told you not to bring her. This
is no place for a child. Why isn’t she at her grandmother’s?”
“My poor darling, you must be quite exhausted,” he replied, refusing to be riled. “But look at the little mite, she’s perfect.
Look, Sarah, your lovely little sister.” Sarah took one look at me—still attached to the umbilical cord, still smeared with
slime—and began to scream.
“Congratulations, Mr. Lyndhurst, but you’re a little premature,” said Mary sternly. “All is well. But it’s nearly three o’clock
in the morning, and Sarah should be in bed. According to hospital rules, you shouldn’t be here at all, and certainly not with
your daughter. It disturbs the other patients at this time of night. There’s clearing up to do. And then Mrs. Lyndhurst and
baby Hope need some sleep. So please go home and come back in the morning.”
“Hope? I never . . . Oh, never mind. Hope, that’s the prettiest name I ever heard. Next to Sarah, that is.”
Sarah’s head was buried in my father’s overcoat. “Baby horrid. Mummy horrid,” she sobbed. “Daddy and Sarah go home.”
My dad smiled on regardless. He says he fell in love with both of us girls from the first second he saw us. I’ve never once
had reason to doubt him.
• • •
Unlike my mother, I revel in having been born on January 1 around halfway through the twentieth century. It kind of puts me
in the thick of things, gives my birthday an extra significance, a bit of historical context, as my dad would say. Okay, this
year it has a significance I could have done without, but as a rule, it has worked in my favor. Mostly, I’ve chimed rather
well with the decades. As I came in, rationing was about to go out, and by the time Harold Macmillan, in 1957, told Britons
that they’d “never had it so good,” that was true of my family. I managed to squeeze in about five minutes of swinging at
the end of the ’60s; I marched to a faint-hearted feminist tune in the ’70s; in the ’80s I became a working mum and soared
to the peak of my profession, although I never voted for Margaret Thatcher; and in the ’90s . . . what did I do in the ’90s?
I just carried on doing what I’d done in the ’80s, minus the shoulder pads. Oh, and I took up yoga, to which I was totally
unsuited, because my head steadfastly refuses to unclutter even when I’m asleep. My fight-or-flight mechanism is on constant
red alert. I’m not even sure I see the point of relaxing. It’s not doing stuff that makes me anxious. Lying on a mat with someone else’s feet too close to my nose, trying to imagine the gentle
swish of waves beside the seashore, makes my breathing go all funny—fast and short and shallow, instead of slow and deep and
regular.
It seems to me that I’ve gone from zero to fifty in about the same time as it takes a Ferrari Testarossa. One second I was
slithering out from between my ill-tempered mother’s legs, the next, whoosh, here I am weighing up whether to bleach or laser
my incipient mustache. I don’t care what those inane glossy magazines tell you—oops, I nearly neglected to mention that I
am editor in chief of one of those very same glossy magazines—but fifty is not fabulous, it’s not fun, and it definitely isn’t
funny.
I do love giving parties, though, and I would have been thrilled to be giving one on New Year’s Eve if not for the F-word.
Jack and I sat down to do the invites under various headings. First, Family.
“That’s easy,” said Jack, “what with my parents both being dead and yours on holiday in Cape Town.” I ignored him and wrote
down my sister, Sarah, her husband, William, and their three girls, Jessie, Amanda, and Sam.
“Don’t forget my delightful sister,” Jack continued.
“As if I could,” I replied glumly, adding Anita to the list. Anita, who hates me, and her husband, Rupert, who hates everybody,
so at least I don’t have to take it personally. Next up my cousin Mike, who loves me, and his new boyfriend, a ruggedly handsome
Slav named Stanko whom I’m prepared to love, but only once Mike tells me he is definitely The One.
Then Best Friends, mine, Jack’s, and Olly’s (I’m already resigned to the fact that Olly and his pals will exit the party at
the first opportunity), with marvelous, maddening, unpredictable Maddy—Dr. M. to her adoring patients—right at the top of
the BF list; then the aforementioned BFs abroad. There are about ten of them in various parts of the globe, and they book
flights as casually as they make restaurant reservations.
After that came the second tier. Colleagues and bosses, school mums and dads (Olly would have gone ballistic if he’d seen
this category on the list), old school friends whom I see once a year, neighbors so they won’t complain about the noise, plus
one set of neighbors who have been promoted to New Best Friend status. (Original BFs, like Pringles Original or original Branston
pickles, need to have been around for at least twenty years to qualify; NBFs can be made in a week, although you’ll never
love them as much as your BFs.) What is it with me? I may be pushing fifty, but I still think like a small child. Fifty going
on four. That’s part of the problem, I suppose. When the numbers reached eighty-five, Jack declared a halt.
The guest list sorted, next came the question of food. If there’s anything that marks me out as Jewish—apart from hair that
frizzes at the mere mention of the word “moisture”—it’s my attitude about food. It’s one of the many reasons Jack’s sister,
Anita, hates me. I do food all the time, and in copious quantities. My fridge is so full it keeps springing back open the
second I shut it. Once a frozen chicken fell out and landed on Anita’s toe, and it broke—the toe, not the chicken. Some people
have second homes on the Costa del Sol; mine’s on the Finchley Road at Waitrose. Quite a hike from there to the coast.
In the almost twenty years Jack and I have been together, we have been to Anita and Rupert’s place for dinner maybe five times.
Anita has been to our place more like five hundred times. She thinks I invite her to spite her. It’s me who does Christmas,
too. Jack’s a Christian (lapsed), and Olly is whatever suits him on any given day. It’s not that I particularly like cooking,
but for me, friends around a table groaning with food (even if the food has come straight from the deli) is one of life’s
great pleasures.
So the food was going to have to be fantastic.
I rang Pam. “Pam? Fancy doing a New Year’s Eve party for eighty-five?”
A former junior editor on my magazine who left journalism only six months ago to become a caterer, Pam was perhaps a bit of
a risk. But she deserved a boost, and if all went well, she’d make lots of new contacts.
“Food stations, darling,” she insisted, “so right for you and so right for now.” I could swear Pam never called anyone “darling”
before she went into the party-planning business. And I didn’t have a clue what food stations were.
“What exactly—”
“Grazing areas. Food stations are strategically placed so you can pick up delicious morsels of sustenance—some hot, so. . .
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Fifty Is Not a Four-Letter Word
Linda Kelsey
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