‘There’s one portion of salad and one portion of soup left for lunch today,’ says Pierre. ‘I have a slight preference for the soup.’
The salad turns out to be a handful of tiny lettuce leaves and a few left-over olives. ‘Wasn’t there a cucumber?’ Beatrice asks. ‘Oh yeah, I used that up yesterday,’ says Pierre, sitting down to a steaming bowl of the spicy pumpkin soup Beatrice made at the weekend.
I like September, the way the light changes, and real life starts up again. But every year, as the children go back to school, I remember that stones-in-the-stomach feeling with which I’d wake up on the first day of term, nauseated by the prospect of several more months of boredom, bullying and lack of freedom. Work was not quite so bad — the bullying was less overt and you were allowed out at lunchtime — but the feeling of returning to the office after a holiday was similar — dread of what awaited me, and a sense of entering a dark tunnel.
Since I drove away from my office for the last time in January 2020, I have not had that suffocating feeling. Some social encounters still fill me with horror, a life without meetings seems an impossibility, and there is of course plenty to worry about, from the personal to the global. But for the first time since I trotted off to school aged five, my time belongs to me.
When I left work I did not know what my days would look like. I’ve never been big on planning, and anyway life has a way of scuppering our attempts to order the present, let alone the future. I had plenty of advice, of course, about structure and purpose and how I might ‘fill my time’, as if that was what I wanted to do. But then came lockdown, and with it freedom from all those new ‘oughts’.
It’s taken me some time. Even I, with my hatred of ritual and timetables, was a little freaked by all that empty time stretching before me. Unable to quite let go of my former role, I offered to do some freelance work for my company, but soon tired of them messing me about. I contemplated a weekly volunteering slot, but in the end took on some small tasks I could do without leaving my laptop. I’m never idle. I’ve spent months helping two Ukrainian families navigate UK bureaucracy, I’ve grown baby sweetcorn and runner beans for the first time, I’ve seen friends I’ve been meaning to meet up with for years. But all along I’ve felt that at some point — when we could go out again, when I’d finished sorting out my aunt’s and my father’s estates, when I had some more energy — I would work out what I wanted to ‘do’ with my retirement. The fact that I had never managed to fathom what I was doing with my life in the previous 60 years did not occur to me.
***
In the Jim Jarmusch film Only Lovers left Alive , Adam and Eve are vampires who’ve lived for centuries. Unlike so many of the destructive, warring, ignorant humans around them (who they refer to as ‘zombies’) the vampire couple are cultured, knowledgeable, creative, caring. When Adam, tired of the ‘zombies’ and their ‘fear of their own imaginations’ contemplates suicide, Eve says to him ‘How can you have lived for so long and still not get it? This self-obsession, it’s a waste of living, that could be spent on surviving things, appreciating nature, nurturing kindness and friendship. And dancing.’
Sometimes Simon and I talk over lunch or coffee about work. All those years of meetings and deadlines, running to catch the train, losing sleep. ‘I’m not sure I actually achieved anything,’ says Simon, who worked for 30 years in the charity sector. Now he has reverted to his pre-teen interests, cycling to nearby fields and woods to spot butterflies, walking down the river at dusk with his bat detector listening to the calls of pipistrelles and Daubentons on their nightly foraging.
And what am I doing? Sitting in the garden reading. Wandering to the allotment in the evenings. Writing letters in a room of my own. And sewing. My mother was a great seamstress and in our house sewing was a serious business. One I’ve more or less rejected the whole of my adult life. Now, without the rules, and with the encouragement of a lovely neighbour, I am embroidering. Not the old regimented embroidery with ironed-on templates and sensible colours, but something that looks more like a sampler created by a lunatic — a whirl of colours and styles made up as I go along. I can’t stop it. I sew and sew, trying new stitches to see what they look like, picking colours by feel, entranced by making something.
And so, it seems what we want in retirement is not to learn a new language (as if), to study for an MA or PhD, to take long holidays or do good works. We have discovered our second childishness. What we want to do is play. We’re still good citizens of course — we do our bit. But our heart’s desire is to make, and to be in the world. We write funny little stories, head off on our bikes with a sandwich and an apple, indulge our 10-year old selves. There’s no-one now to tell us we can’t, to ask what we’ve been doing. For the first time in our lives our days are our own, and time has never seemed more precious.
‘There’s a headline in today’s Guardian’, says Pierre, ‘“Has King Charles had space to mourn?” Clearly not, since he’s been busy with state affairs ever since she died.’
‘Does anyone have time to grieve before a funeral?’ Beatrice asks. ‘Presumably he hasn’t had to spend several hours in HSBC trying to close her bank account, or a morning emptying the out-of-date food from her fridge and taking her books back to the library.’
‘I’m trying to work out if I ought to feel sadder about the queen dying,’ says Beatrice.
‘What would you do if you decided you should?’
‘I don’t know, but I sometimes feel we’ve missed out on a lot of things like this out of some kind of intellectual snobbery.’
‘I’ve been doing that since I was a teenager,’ says Pierre. ‘I’ve basically missed the whole of life.’
Simon phones his dad, who tells him that, because he is 95, he’s reading a book about exercises to improve memory. He recites a mnemonic for recalling the colours of the rainbow, but can’t remember what colours the letters ‘I’ and ‘V’ stand for.
I suppose every true Englishwoman feels she has let down her race if she does not go out black-berrying at least once every autumn.
(Stella Martin Currey, One Woman’s Year, 1953)
I cycle home, contemplating a quiet afternoon in the garden, to find that my neighbour is having yet another noisy gathering in his. I fume and curse, trail the CD player out of the back door and put on Verdi’s Requiem at full volume.
My phone says a parcel has been delivered. I dash barefoot out of the front door, and as I am dragging the package out from behind a plant pot, the door slams locked behind me.
Simon is on a train somewhere in Berkshire. The neighbours who hold a key are in Devon. Verdi is playing in the open back doorway, behind a padlocked and bolted six-foot gate.
On a whim, I bring out the patchwork quilt I made in my schooldays, to use on my bed. What else am I saving it for?
It’s been in various bags and boxes in various rooms and lofts of the various places I’ve lived for several decades. It has aired on the washing line for hours. And still, by the time I go to bed, it has filled the room with the sweet smell of my parents’ house.
Bill the carpenter comes to fix the rotten floor in my darkroom. In the same time it takes him to remove the entire floor and build in new joists, two men from the council, with a great deal more noise, replace four pieces of wood in a fence across the road.
Pierre is telling Beatrice about Pasolini’s film Oedipus Rex and its relation to Sophocles’ play. ‘This kitchen counter is filthy,’ says Beatrice, showing him the black line of grime on her cloth. ‘Isn’t this supposed to be part of your cleaning regime?’
janebuekett 