Authors: Jim Powell
What I thought most was how little all this was, how very little.
I’ve never envied my parents’ generation. I’ve never envied my grandparents’ generation. Nor do I envy my children’s generation, nor their children’s. As a
matter of fact, there is no future generation that I envy, and precious few in the past.
But everybody envies us. Everybody thinks that our bums landed in the butter, that we have danced the last tango. The first third of our lives was funded by our parents and the State; the last
third is supposedly being funded by our children and the State. Possibly we were self-supporting in the middle third. We are allegedly the one generation to be universally envied, and to envy no
one. Except it’s not true. In reality, we envy more than any of our enviers, and what we envy is our own youth and how it amounted to so little. What we mistook for the promised land turned
out to be a grazing pasture en route to a land of promises. Our generation made the great mistake of peaking too soon, in fact barely after we’d arrived.
Judy had bought a new dress for this occasion, or at least I thought she had. I may have been mistaken. I don’t notice her dresses. They come from the smartest boutique in Barnet, which is
not saying a great deal. She dyes her hair these days, or at least I think she does. I don’t like to ask, but it seems more black than it did a few years ago. She certainly has it styled at
the smartest salon in Barnet, which is saying even less. In short, Judy has succeeded in turning into her mother, and I have failed to prevent myself turning into my father.
She was talking to the chief executive of my company, the long and grinding toad called Rupert Loxley. He had not fired me at this point; for him, that pleasure lay ahead. Judy was talking to
him because she still believed she was living in the era in which it was thought that if a man had a charming wife it would help his career. I’ve tried explaining to her that I might as well
be bumming a Lithuanian rent boy for all the difference it would make, but she doesn’t believe me. She was talking to him because she knew that he had got the job, three years earlier, that I
had expected to get and thought I deserved to get. And because she suspected that I might not have accepted that rejection with the requisite good grace, and hoped that her charm might repair
whatever harm I had done to my prospects.
Judy’s children, who I’m obliged to admit are also my children, were talking to each other’s partners. Whether this was an active choice, or out of indifference towards the
other guests, was debatable. Sarah, our daughter, was talking to Zoë, partner of Adam, our son. Adam was talking to Rufus, Sarah’s partner. I couldn’t hear what they were saying. I
didn’t need to. Adam and Rufus would be discussing which computer games they had downloaded, and how many thousands of virtual people they could kill with them. At their age, I was going on
peace demos to save the lives of real people, but what the hell.
Sarah and Zoë would be engaged in a wide-ranging conversation comprising, but by no means limited to, the noise levels in various clubbing establishments, the record amount each had spent
in a day on designer clothes, the best Taylor Swift song ever, the relative merits of Tristan da Cunha and the Nicobar islands as holiday destinations, and twenty original ways of styling your
pubic hair. As far as I could see, Sarah was not wearing a bra. She seldom did. It was her only known act of rebellion against her mother. I think she thought that it made her a feminist.
I could go on, but what’s the point? I expect you think I’m exaggerating, that I have a jaundiced view of the young. I am not so limited in my prejudices. I have a jaundiced view of
everyone, myself most of all. People a few years older than Sarah and Adam are now running the country, which is terrifying. Their idea of the long term is something that will look good in next
Sunday’s papers. Tony Blair apparently told Roy Jenkins that he wished he’d studied history at university. I think we all wish that, don’t we?
As for the friends who were there that evening, all I can say is that they weren’t. Friends, I mean, although they might as well not have been there either. They were acquaintances who now
needed to be called friends because of the countless times we had seen them.
So I was spending my sixtieth birthday, supposedly the celebration of a notable achievement, looking out of my bedroom window, drinking whisky, thinking that my adult life had been pretty
pathetic. At some point, rather later than I had expected, Judy must have noticed my absence and she came indoors to find me.
‘There you are, Matthew. What on earth are you doing up here?’ Her eyes travelled to my whisky glass, which has become their default point of focus, and she supplied her own answer.
‘How many have you had?’
‘I’ve had a few,’ I said. ‘But, then again, too few to mention.’
‘It’s not a very good idea to get tight when your boss is here.’
‘Why did you invite him, then? I didn’t want to see him.’
‘Matthew, I think you might make an effort. Tonight of all nights. Everyone’s come to see you.’
Everyone had not come to see me. Everyone would rather be sitting at home in their slippers, watching TV and eating beans on toast. Our children and their partners had come because Judy had
applied a three-line whip. Everyone else had come because they had been invited six months ahead of time and were not bright enough to come up with an excuse.
‘Oh I see,’ I said. ‘I’m so sorry – I didn’t realize. Simply everyone has come to see me.
Le tout
Barnet has come to see Matthew Oxenhay. What a
popular man I must be.’
‘Please, Matthew. Just tonight. For my sake.’
I sighed.
‘You never used to be like this.’
‘I’ll be down in a few minutes,’ I said.
‘Please won’t you come down with me now?’
‘Stop hassling me, Judy. I’ll be down in a few minutes.’ I think I may have seen a tear in her eye as she left the room.
I felt like a shit. I knew exactly what Judy meant, that her reproaches were mild in the circumstances. I hated myself for the way I behaved at times and, the more I hated myself, the more I
behaved that way. I wondered sometimes whether I was trying to make Judy hate me, trying to provoke her into leaving me. If so, that would be a poor strategy. Judy is not the leaving type. Judy is
the soldier-on-and-make-the-best-of-it type. We might as well come from different generations. In fact, we do.
Judy is four years older than me, born in 1944. You wouldn’t think that four years should make much of a difference, but when it is those four years, they do. She and most of her
contemporaries grew up as conformists, and I and most of mine grew up as rebels. We wanted to change the world. They wanted to make it safe. One consequence is that Judy’s lot are now content
with life, and mine are bloody furious.
When we met, Judy was a secretary. Of course she was; what else would she have been? That generation of women all became secretaries. Or at least the ones that didn’t become nurses or
dentists’ receptionists or librarians. She stopped work, paid work I mean, when she first became pregnant, never to resume it. You could say that she sacrificed her own life to create a
comfortable life for me and our children. That may be true, but it is too mundane a view. Judy’s life has been devoted to something more cosmic. Before marrying me, she was already betrothed
to the idea of the nuclear family, to the security of the cocoon that could be woven around it. I was thought to be a suitable, if incidental, vehicle for the consummation, and for that reason I
could be loved. Judy would not say that she had sacrificed her life. Judy would say that she had been fulfilled. No progressive social theorist could convince her otherwise.
You may wonder how Judy and I ever came to marry, or even got as far as a first date. I was twenty-three when we met. I had submitted to the compulsory experience of doomed romanticism. I was
now surrounded by plenty of emancipated young women who thought it was cool to screw around. I’m not complaining, because I thought it was cool to screw around too, and I don’t want to
be thought a hypocrite. But, just as I’m sure that there were plenty of cool young women secretly hoping for a man who would not screw around, so there were plenty of cool young men hoping
for a woman ditto. There was some issue of supply and demand here, but we were all into Marxist economics at the time. No one was a supply-sider then.
Judy did not screw around. In fact, it took quite some time to get her to screw at all. Funnily enough, that was a large part of her attraction. I think I always knew that we were coming from
different directions. For me that was refreshing, and perhaps it was for her too. Unfortunately, we also had different destinations in mind. When you are trying hard to be attractive to someone,
you minimize the differences between you. Possibly that is the worst mistake humans habitually make. It might be better to exaggerate the differences and see if the relationship survives. The
differences will surface sooner or later, and by then it may be too late.
If two people stand in the same place and set out on a shared journey, and if one starts walking at an angle that is one degree different from the other, after thirty-five years, which is how
long we’ve been married, the two of them will be miles apart. If I were a mathematician, I could tell you how many miles after thirty-five years at 4 mph, which is what Baden-Powell
determined to be the proper pace for a Boy Scout. Since I was looking at Angela Jones’s legs in Maths too, I can only say that it feels like thousands of miles, and very probably is.
It was another twenty minutes and two whiskies later before I came downstairs. Judy looked crestfallen. Everyone was standing around waiting for me. There seemed to be an expectation that
something significant was about to happen. I was issued with a Prosecco, and Adam and Rufus wheeled a small trolley through the French windows with a large cake upon it. It was one of those bespoke
cakes made at home by women who don’t pay tax, for which they charge outrageous prices plus VAT, which they don’t pay either.
This one was an artist’s impression of the Bank of England, much as the Bank is itself these days. It had an iced inscription on the roof that read ‘60 YEARS OLD AND STILL KING OF
THE FUTURES’. Rupert Loxley pretended to find this amusing. I lopped a large slice off the cake – the first of many slices to be lopped off the Bank this year, it now occurs to me
– and everyone clapped and laughed as if it was the cleverest thing they had seen. Judy said a few words of breathtaking banality and then it was my turn.
I can’t say I wasn’t warned. As with any event that Judy organizes, every last element of it was predictable. I had no excuse not to be prepared to give a speech, not to have thought
of a thesaurus of inanities to suit the occasion. If I had, I might have redeemed the rest of my behaviour that evening. At the very least, I might have expressed some gratitude to Judy.
But I hadn’t prepared anything. I had deliberated and procrastinated before copping out with a decision to be spontaneous for once in my life. I knew it was a mistake when I decided on it;
even more so when I opened my mouth. On the spur of that moment, it seemed like a funny idea. I would, briefly, recapitulate the flaws and inadequacies of everyone present. Just as people were
starting to become uneasy, I would proceed to catalogue my own flaws and inadequacies. Then I would conclude that it’s our failings that make us lovable, or some such crap, and aver my
deepest love for all present.
It may not have been a good idea in the first place. Combining the sincere with the insincere seldom works: it’s best to stick to one or the other, in this case the latter. It is also true
that I dwelt on everyone else’s flaws and inadequacies for longer than I had intended. I was approaching the bit about my own flaws when I felt my legs subsiding. I slipped, with some
elegance I believe, into a nearby wicker chair and passed out.
When I awoke, it was the early hours of the morning. No lights were on in the house. The patio doors were locked. It was surprisingly warm, though, and several near-empty bottles of flat
Prosecco still littered the lawn, so I poured them into one bottle and sat in my wicker chair, sipping from it and pondering the nature of existence. Shortly after seven, when I had disappeared
into the shrubbery at the side of the house for a pee, Sarah and Adam walked out onto the patio. I stood around the corner and eavesdropped.
‘I wonder where he’s got to,’ said Sarah.
‘Fucked off, with any luck,’ said Adam.
‘Don’t be like that. He needs help.’
‘He’s not getting any from me. Not after last night.’
‘He didn’t mean it. You know that.’
‘Saz, I’m past caring whether he means it or not. If he doesn’t mean it, why does he keep doing it?’
‘Because he’s miserable.’
‘What’s he got to be miserable about?’
‘Work,’ said Sarah. ‘That’s what Mum thinks. It’s why she invited his boss to the party.’
‘If you ask me, things started to go wrong when he didn’t get the top job,’ said Adam. ‘That’s when the drinking started. How long ago was that?’
‘About three years. Exactly the time that Mum was ill.’
‘I hate to think how much booze has gone down the hatch since then. It’s about time he got a grip on it.’
‘It can’t have been easy for him,’ said Sarah. ‘He was brilliant with Mum, even if he was on the bottle. All that time he took off work to look after her. It must have
been a really difficult time for him.’
‘Well, it was a bloody difficult time for Mum too. And she coped with it a lot better than Dad did. I don’t know how she puts up with him, Saz. And I don’t know
why
she puts up with him.’
‘He’s not himself, Adam. You can see that, can’t you?’
‘It’s how he’s been for three years. How much longer do we give him?’
Sarah sighed.
‘Come on,’ said Adam. ‘I’ve got to go in a few minutes. Let’s get some coffee.’
They went back inside, and I manoeuvred my way back to the wicker chair and the remains of the Prosecco. I would like to say I felt chastened, but I didn’t. There was nothing I had heard I
didn’t already know, or couldn’t have guessed. Actually, that’s not quite true. I hadn’t realized Judy was sniffing into my situation at work. That would have to be watched.
Otherwise, I still appeared to have one child a little on my side. The problem was that I was more inclined to agree with the other. I was beyond redemption.