Coming of Age

By Ros Glancey

When Jessica's husband left her for a younger woman, she expected to spend her life reading and listening to music. But things don't turn out as she expects. Her three children, high flying Sarah, her husband Roland and two lively granddaughters, younger daughter Harriet and partner Russell and son Alex, are full of suggestions for what she can do . Then there are her friends, Val, Poppy and Julia to console her, plus neighbours like do-gooding Fran and hypochondriac Mavis and all the gossip of a small town to fill her days.
Jessica tries Salsa dancing, ski-ing, having a singles dinner party, has her hair coloured and tries to buy some new clothes suitable for an older woman, gets involved in the Town Pageant, goes on holiday to Italy and Dublin and visits her mother in her retirement home in East Anglia where she spends her days downing cans of Red Bull interspersed with Guinness.
In the end, she finds romance in the most unlikely place and goes carol singing with hilarious consequences. Bridget Jones eat your heart out.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ros Glancey
• Release date: May 11, 2011
• ISBN: 9781458006080

Ros Glancey

Ros Glancey is the fiction writing name used by Barbara Abbs, garden writer (Guide to French Gardens; Choosing & Using Climbing Plants; Gardens of Belgium and the Netherlands; and The Conservatory Month by Month)'When I reached pensionable age, as a woman I suddenly felt I had become a non-person. But women's lives today are vastly different from those of our mothers and grandmothers. For one thing, our mothers are probably still alive and we have working daughters, and grandchildren, plus friends and lovers. And even work...But this is still not really visible in literature.

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COMING OF AGE

Copyright © Ros Glancey 2011

Smashwords Edition

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CHAPTER ONE

‘We must do something,’ said Val. ‘I can’t bear to get to the end of next year with my life exactly the same.’

It is that time of year when the hurdle of Christmas is approaching; the days are short, damp and dark.

‘You need a new man.’ I say.

‘No, you do Jess.’

‘No I don’t.’ I say.

And this is true. I do not have room in my life for a new man.

When I arrived home that day after visiting my mother to find a note from Martin to say he had gone and I was surely not surprised, I sat down and put some music on, Mozart I think, and continued to try and read the book I was in the middle of. Well, I thought, That’s that. I knew enough divorced or separated older women to know that the solitary life would be mine hereafter and I had better get used to it. There were always books and music.

I was wrong. In fact a life that I thought would be almost monotone, like a straight gravel path, more resembles a badly designed herbaceous border, a jumble of plants of clashing colours. There is mother, my daughters, Sarah and Harriet and their husbands, my son Alex, two grandchildren, some really good friends plus neighbours, whose lives are an endless source of interest and, it must be said, occasionally annoyance.

There isn’t room for another man in my life. There are already too many: the dentist, doctor, hairdresser, osteopath, podiatrist, acupuncturist and chemist, the maintenance men who keep me going. Plus the plumber, of whom more later.

Val is a different matter. She is always in love with somebody or other or dreaming of opening a knicker shop, a women’s refuge, going to the south seas on a banana boat or doing VSO.

Val looks thoughtful. I start running through all the places where potential partners have been found. Dog walking. In the pub. At evening classes?

‘Too much trouble. Too expensive to come often. All women.’

Val falls easily into pessimism.

I’m sure we had this conversation last year I think to myself. Probably in the same place too.

We are sitting in the bar of the town’s largest hotel. There is no-one else there. Even the barman has disappeared.

‘We must be positive’, I say. What do you actually like doing?’

‘I used to love dancing at school ,’said Val. ‘Why don’t we see what there is.’

‘I’d like to dance too,’ I say. In later life I had discovered that I quite liked to throw myself round to music. Dancing was probably an exaggeration of what I actually did these days but why hadn’t I done more of it when young? Of course Martin wouldn’t dance.

We scour the local paper and discover there is line dancing (no partner needed) in a local community centre or salsa dancing in a church hall. (all ages).

‘We can’t do line dancing,’ says Val, ‘You have to wear cowboy boots, a fringed shirt and a big hat.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Well, I think so.’

So we decide to try salsa dancing. I ring the number in the newspaper advertisement and speak to Antonio, he of the Tropical Hot Salsa dancing troupe. I explain that we are two ladies of pensionable age. All ages welcome, he says, sounding not remotely Spanish or Latin American, ‘we have people up to seventy five. No you don’t need a partner. Just come along.’

We can’t come that week because we have a prior engagement. Val and I, together with friends Poppy and Julia, meet monthly on a Saturday – the evening when for a single woman there is nothing to do and nothing on the television either. We have dinner together and occasionally go to the theatre or a film. This modest arrangement is invariably described by every male acquaintance or relation as A Coven. They think this is a huge joke. Men are very odd about women meeting together while upholding their inalienable right to do so themselves. We do not fall about laughing hysterically at every mention of Pratts or Rotary.

Tomorrow they are coming to my house. It will be an interesting evening. Julia will tell us the different cruises and holidays she’s booked for next year. Actually I am going on one of them with her, which is something to look forward to. Julia is a rich widow. There is something dignified about being a widow that is denied to those of us who have been merely dumped. Widows go back a long way. It says in the Bible that you have to be charitable to widows and orphans whereas abandoned elderly wives on today’s scale are a new phenomenon and no one has to be charitable to them.

The last time we met Poppy was embroiled with a New Zealand beekeeper who was over here for a six month vacation. She met him in a pub where she thought he looked lonely. She is very kind-hearted. Apparently you only need to be around for six months to beekeep in New Zealand. You work hard for half the year, at least the bees do, and then you can take the rest of the time off. When I heard about it I thought this sounded rather good. On looking into however, I discovered you would need thousands of hives to make money over here. British bees do not produce the goods in the right quantity.

Val used to teach art. We might talk about art. But probably we will talk about men; that’s what we usually do. Julia is always praying not to get married again. It would interfere terribly with her bridge and frequent cruises. If you don’t have any inclination to play bridge and can’t afford cruises, then time can hang a little heavily and a husband or lover might fill it up a bit, say Val and Poppy. Mind you, there is a man in Julia’s life, a bridge-player, only ever referred to as ‘the old codger’. She is very secretive about him.

While I am shopping for this evening’s meal, I cross the path of my friend Jean. She is an octogenarian, was brought up as a Christian Scientist and is wonderfully fit and self-possessed. I admire her tremendously.

‘Jessica,’ she says. ‘how are you?’

People are always asking me how I am these days, ever since Martin left. I wonder if they really want to know.

I say. ‘I need to make some changes. What do you think, husband or lover, or a job?’

‘The husband wasn’t very successful last time.’

‘Not all men are like Martin.’ I reply, ever the optimist.

‘No,’ she says, ‘some of them are like…’, and she rattles off a list of the husbands and lovers of almost everyone in the town, pointing our their faults, anal, glum, hypochondriac, passive, car mad, football mad, heavy smoker, alcoholic, mother fixated, controlling and so on.

‘Oh dear’, I sigh as a memory of Martin coming in and turning off The Archers at a crucial denouement flashes into my consciousness. ‘You’re right. But what about Val? You know Val don’t you? She’s been alone for too long. There must be some decent men around somewhere. You know, normal, like all of us for example. We don’t have fixations or horrible habits.’

At dinner later Val confesses to an undying passion for Guy Prodger, her new dentist. Could he be a possibility? He is young.

‘He has wild eyes,’ she says, ‘and looks like Niles in Frasier’

She also has an undying passion for Niles, but unlike Guy Prodger, he is a continent and an ocean away and is, allegedly, gay anyway.

‘What about Eddie Izzard?’ says Poppy. ‘I thought you were in love with him.’ Val’s frequent and undying passions are known to all of us.

‘I adore Eddie Izzard’ sighs Val .

I have never heard of Eddie Izzard and ask who is and what he does. It turns out that he is a transvestite comedian who may be a woman in a man’s body, or a man in a woman’s body but dressed as a man, and an actor. Life is so confusing today. I think wistfully of Gregory Peck. Eddie Izzard doesn’t seem an ideal love object for Val, but then neither is Niles. Even Guy Prodger the wild eyed dentist is probably married and anyway must be thirty years younger than her.

‘I wonder if he likes older women?’, says Val.

What is it about women and dentists I wonder.

‘I suppose it is because you have to lie back, prone and vulnerable, and gaze into their eyes’, says Poppy.

‘No, actually you gaze into their nostrils’ I say.

‘That’s the answer then, says Poppy, ‘It’s like horse taming. Perhaps you could make it mutual, Val, by secretly breathing into his nostrils when he isn’t looking.’

The difficulty that Val would have with a drill in her mouth carrying out this procedure seems to elude Poppy.

An old school friend of mine has just married a dentist. Perhaps I should introduce her to Val so that Val can find out about Being Married to a Dentist. In academic circles Being Married to a Dentist is rather akin to being winched off a mountain top by a helicopter, not something you would choose except in a dire emergency. Not that we are in academic circles any more but we both were once, at least married into them. There are dentists in novels. I could do a PhD on The Dentist in Literature. I’ve always fancied being called Doctor instead of Missis or Muzz.

‘Val and I are going salsa dancing next week.’

‘Salsa? What will you wear?’ asks Poppy coming straight to the point as usual.

Val and I look at each other. What is the dress code for salsa dancing?

Julia is convinced that we need split skirts and frills, Poppy lycra leotards.

I spend ages deciding what to wear. Actually it would probably have been easier to go line dancing and wear boots and fringes; at least there would be no decisions involved. I end up in the elderly woman’s evening uniform of palazzo pants and tunic top. Val turns up almost identically dressed.

Nervously we arrive at the church hall at 7 o’clock in time for the beginners class. We needn’t have worried about what to wear. There is everything from figure-hugging exercise gear, little ruffled numbers and high heeled shoes, to baggy jeans and trainers.

There are seven beginners, five women of all ages and two men, both very small. I am suddenly taken back to school dances when, as a tall teenager, I was always the wallflower. Modern girls are so lucky. They don’t have to stand in a line at one end of the dance floor and be scrutinised and then passed over by a group of under-sized acned youths whom, under any other circumstances, they would not have deigned to notice, indeed, would positively have scorned. Nowadays they just get up and dance.

‘Right’ says the teacher. ‘ First stand in a line, men that side, ladies here. I’ll show the men their steps and then the ladies.’

She rapidly runs through sequences of steps, Salsa, Mambo, Cucharacha and Fan. They are quite simple but as soon as she has finished demonstrating each one, I forget them. I have another horrible flashback. This time to ballet classes. I was six years old. I was on stage at the end of term display wearing a green tutu of which I was inordinately proud, in front of an audience of reluctant parents. I couldn’t remember any of the steps and then I tripped over the ballet teacher who had given herself a starring role which seemed to consist of lying collapsed in the middle of the stage dressed as a scarecrow. My mother had been scathing.

Why did I come? It was so long ago, this trauma and the ballroom dancing classes at which I was also a failure, that I had forgotten that I could not remember sequences of movements.

‘Now find yourselves a partner – and remember that Salsa is a close contact sport.’ says the teacher. The two chaps look embarrassed. They don’t seem to be doing much better than me. ‘Men lead, and ladies follow.’

I end up with the teacher as my partner and manage not to trip over her. She’s a good leader and counts all the time, as do I and all the others :‘One, two three, pause, one two three.’ Everybody is muttering and apologising. We all laugh and perhaps it’s not going to be too bad after all.

After the classes there is a mass warm up dance and then something called a meringue. I join the circle for this, beckoning to Val who is lurking on the sidelines. She is a much better dancer than me. Why is she hanging back?

‘Come on, have a go.’

‘No, no I’ll watch you.’

I suppose I provided amusement for the onlookers. I hadn’t realised that you moved round the circle, from partner to partner doing things I never even did with Martin even in the first flush of marriage. The worst bit consisted of a lot of wriggling and body contact, ending up descending towards the ground with bent knees like a cossack dancer, interlocked with a total stranger. My first partner was a young intense man with specs who looked appalled. He probably felt he was dancing with his granny with all the loss of face that that entailed. I got half way to the ground and realised that not only could I go no further down but that I couldn’t return either.

‘I think you’ll need to give me a lift,’ I say to the young man.

He hauls me up and passes me with relief to the next man in the circle. This time I do not go down with bended knees but laugh gaily, as the man descends till his face has reached the level of my abdomen, and I say ‘Sorry. can’t manage this bit.’

Well I think Val enjoyed herself.

Mother lives a couple of hundred miles away in sheltered housing. Every time I visit her I feel I am looking at my own future speeding towards me. There am I, twenty years down the line, in a wheelchair, unable to open a bottle of wine without assistance. In addition I have to remember to say ‘we’ all the time instead of ‘I’. I have not dared to tell her that Martin left me several years ago and I am now, shamefully, divorced. The thought of comments, like ‘I knew it wouldn’t last,’ or ‘I told you so,’ followed by her pointing out that it must have been all my fault is more than I can bear.

I have scarcely dropped my bags on the floor of mother’s sheltered flat when the man from the flat across the corridor comes in bearing a large bunch of bananas. Oh no, says mother. I don’t eat those. They are constipating. This is the beginning of a long conversation about her and his bowels. I instantly feel positively youthful and resolve never to mention any part of my internal workings to anybody except the doctor.

Later that afternoon I sit on the sofa. The television is on, with a quiz show. I try surreptitiously to do a crossword from mother’s paper. She addresses me. I jerk to attention.

‘Why aren’t you watching?’

I mumble a few excuses. Why can’t I say I don’t want to watch it? I sit up straight and begin to watch. I answer a few questions. A mistake. Now she wants to know why I don’t ‘go in for it’, especially as I am short of money.

The next day I have take mother to the supermarket and out to lunch.

I push her heavy wheel chair down the hill into the town, manoeuvring over ramps, kerbs, potholes with mother complaining at every bump. Mother had a Pauline conversion a few years ago when on a visit to a National Trust house with my elder daughter Sarah and her husband Roland. It was decided that it would be easier if Mother went in one of the wheel chairs the Trust so thoughtfully provides, rather than use her zimmer frame. She enjoyed the experience of being pushed around so much that she has refused to walk more than three consecutive steps since.

I am mentally writing letter to local council and worrying about my various displaced vertebrae and pelvic misalignment when mother says ‘I don’t know why you and Maureen can’t manage to push me. No one else has any problems.’

I point out that my cousin Maureen is over 70 and I am 64.

‘Oh are you,’ she says, surprised. ‘I still think of you as a little girl.’

Before I leave mother tells me she has joined the local Disability Group and has made lots of new friends. I am relieved and feel slightly less guilty about looking forward to being back home. Another visit over and she has not asked me why Martin never comes to visit or indeed, never picks up the telephone whatever time of the day or night she calls.

When I return Sarah rings up to see how I have weathered my visit and to make arrangements for Christmas. I am to spend Christmas with them this