The Time of Their Lives Read online

  For my four wonderful friends, Alex, Claire, Harriet and Presiley, whom I met on the first day of university and continue to meet every month for friendship and fizz. You have so enriched my life, thank you.

  And also for Jane, who asked the question –

  ‘What are we all going to do with the rest of our lives?’ – that sparked this novel.

  FOREWORD

  When my four friends and I meet up – as we do every month – to drink wine and share confidences, we all agree on one thing: We may not be young, but we still feel young.

  At my age my mother dressed like the Queen. We like to dress stylishly, to go out and enjoy ourselves. As one of the characters in The Time of Their Lives points out, ‘the only way you can tell a woman’s age these days is to look at her husband!’

  We are the first generation who may live for another thirty years and sometimes, to the irritation of our children, there’s one thing we’re sure about – we intend to make the most of it!

  ‘I don’t even use the word because, first of all, that’s what old people do and, secondly, that’s what you do after dinner.’

  Dame Marjorie Scardino, ex-rodeo rider and first woman CEO of a British FTSE company, on the subject of retiring.

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  Having It All

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 1

  ‘OK, girls,’ Claudia looked round at her three closest friends who were gathered for their usual night out in The Grecian Grove, a basement wine bar sporting badly drawn murals of lecherous shepherds chasing nymphs who didn’t look as if they were trying that hard to get away, ‘does anyone know what date it is today?’

  To call them girls, Claudia knew, was pushing it. They weren’t girls, as a matter of fact, they were women. Late middle-aged women. Once they would have been called old, but now, since sixty was the new forty, that had all changed.

  Sal, Ella and Laura shrugged and exchanged mystified glances. ‘It’s not your birthday? No, that’s in February and you’ll be—’ Ella ventured.

  ‘Don’t say it out loud!’ cut in Sal, ever the most age-conscious of them. ‘Someone might hear you!’

  ‘What, some snake-hipped potential young lover?’ Laura teased. ‘I would feel I owed him the truth.’

  ‘It’s the thirtieth of September,’ Claudia announced as if pulling a rabbit from a hat.

  ‘So?’ They all looked bemused.

  ‘It was on the thirtieth of September that we all first met.’ Claudia pulled a faded photograph from her bag. ‘The first day of term at university. Over forty years ago!’

  Sal looked as if she might pass out. The others scrambled to see. There they were. Four hopeful eighteen-year-olds with long fringes, short skirts and knee-length boots, optimism and hope shining out of their fresh young faces.

  ‘I must admit,’ Ella said proudly, ‘we look pretty good. Why do the young never believe they’re beautiful? All I remember thinking was that my skin was shit and I ought to lose a stone.’

  Claudia looked from her friends to the photo. At first glance Sal had worn best, with her chic clothes and fashionable haircut, but then she’d never had a husband or children to wear her out. Besides, there was something a little overdone about Sal’s look that spoke of trying too hard. Laura had always been the most conventionally pretty, given to pastel sweaters and single strings of pearls. You knew, looking at Laura, that as a child she had probably owned a jewellery-box with a ballerina on top which revolved to the music. This ballerina had remained Laura’s fashion icon. Next there was Ella. She had always been the elfin one. Then, three years ago, tragedy had struck out of a blue sky and had taken its toll, but she was finally looking like the old Ella. Oddly, she looked younger, not older, because she didn’t try to alter her age.

  Then there was Claudia herself with her carefully coloured hair in the same shade of nut-brown she always chose, not because it was her actual colour, she couldn’t even recall what that was, but because Claudia believed it looked more natural. She wore her usual baggy beige jumper with the inevitable camisole underneath, jeans and boots.

  ‘It can’t be as long ago as that,’ Sal wailed, looking as if she could see a bus coming towards her and couldn’t get out of its path.

  ‘They were good times, weren’t they?’ sighed Ella. She knew her two daughters judged things differently. They saw their parents’ generation as selfish, not to mention promiscuous and probably druggy. The baby boomers had been the lucky ones, they moaned, inheritors of full employment, generous pensions and cheap property prices while their children had to face insecure jobs, extortionate housing costs and working till they were seventy.

  Ella thought about it. They were right about the promiscuous bit. She would never dare confess to her daughters that at the age of twenty she’d prevented a man from telling her his name as they made love, preferring instead the excitement of erotic anonymity. How awful. Had she really done that? Not to mention slept with more men than she could remember the names of. Ah, the heady days after the Pill and before Aids.

  Ella found herself smiling.

  It had been an amazing moment. The music, the festivals, the sense that the young suddenly had the power and that times really were a-changing. But it was all a very long while ago.

  Claudia put the photograph carefully back in her bag. ‘I have a question to ask.’ She poured them another glass of wine. ‘The question is, seeing as we may have another thirty years to live, what the hell are we going to do with the rest of our lives?’

  ‘Won’t you go on teaching?’ Ella asked, surprised. Claudia was so dedicated to her profession and had been teaching French practically since they left university. ‘I thought you could go on forever nowadays.’

  ‘I’m not sure I want to,’ Claudia replied.

  They stared at her, shocked. ‘But you love teaching. You say it keeps you in touch with the young!’ Laura protested.

  ‘Not enough in touch, apparently.’ Claudia tried to keep the bitterness out of her voice. ‘I’m out of tune with technology, it seems. My favourite year group has been reassigned to a younger teacher who gets them to learn slang on YouTube. It’s having an energizing effect on even the slowest pupils according to the deputy head.’

  Claudia tried not to remember the deputy head’s patronizing tone yesterday, when she had explained, as if talking to a very old person, that Peter Dooley, a squirt of thirty known by the rest of the staff as Drooly Dooley because of his habit of showering you with spit when he talked, would be taking over her favourite pupils.

  ‘Mr Dooley!’ Claudia had replied furiously. ‘He has no experience of the real France! He looks everything up on the Internet!’

  Too late she realized her mistake.

  ‘Exactly!’ the deputy head insisted; she was only thirty herself, with an MBA, not even a teaching degree, from a university in the North East – an ex-poly at that, Claudia had thought bitchily.

  ‘But you’ve always been amazing with your pupils!’ Sal defen
ded indignantly. ‘Do you remember, years before the Internet, you made tapes up with you and Gaby speaking French to one another? Your pupils loved them!’

  Claudia blanched. The deputy head had actually produced one of these twenty-year-old anachronisms during their interview and had had the gall to hold it up and ask in a sugary tone, ‘Of course you probably think the old ways are best, don’t you, Claudia?’

  Claudia had wanted to snap that she was perfectly au fait with modern teaching methods, thank you very much. But the truth was she was beginning to feel defeated. For the first time, since those heady days of the photograph, she had started to feel old. And it wasn’t the fault of memory loss or the war with grey hair.

  It was technology.

  Jean-Paul Sartre might say hell was other people, but he’d never been to an Apple store on a busy Saturday, only to be told you needed an appointment to talk to a ‘genius’, one of a thousand identikit geeky youths, before you could ask a simple question.

  Nor had he to contend with the horrors of the ‘managed learning environment’ where pupils and even their parents could go online and access their school work from home. Even the tech-savviest staff found it a nightmare to operate. As if that weren’t enough, now teachers were expected to identify their pupils’ weaknesses using some hideous software developed by a ten-year-old!

  ‘Snotty cow,’ Ella’s angry voice echoed through The Grecian Grove in Claudia’s defence. ‘You’re far better at technology than I am. I still think an iPad is something made by Optrex. What are you going to do about it?’

  ‘Actually,’ Claudia realized the truth for the first time herself, ‘I might even resign.’

  ‘Claudia, no!’ Laura was shocked. ‘But you love teaching and you’re really good at it!’

  ‘Am I? Seriously, girls, the bastards think we’re has-beens. Drooly Dooley even said, “If it’s any consolation, Claudia, a lot of the older teachers are struggling with the system.”’

  ‘Bollocks!’ protested Sal, emptying her glass.

  ‘Anyway, another school would snap you up!’ Laura, always the positive one in the group, happily married for twenty-five years and a great believer in the virtues of the institution, was attempting to answer Claudia’s question. ‘You’re a wonderful teacher. You’d find something else useful to do. Funny, it only seems the blink of an eye since we first met. We should just keep calm and carry on. It’ll only be another blink till we’re ninety.’

  ‘Except that this blink will be punctuated by arthritis, memory loss and absence of bladder control,’ Sal pointed out laconically. ‘And anyway, you should fight back! Don’t take ageism lying down. We’re not old yet. Not even middle-aged.’

  Maybe because she was the one who most needed to earn her living, Sal was fighting ageing the hardest. She had declared war on body fat, laughter lines and any clothing in baggy linen. The dress she wore today was black gabardine, strictly sculpted and teamed with high heels. Ella had given up on anything but flatties years ago, and Claudia was wearing trainers so that she could walk to the tube.

  She liked to walk to work on school days. But would there be any more school to walk to? Claudia asked herself glumly, as she poured out the last of the resin-flavoured Greek wine into their glasses.

  ‘You’d definitely find another teaching job,’ Laura comforted, with all the encouraging optimism of someone who didn’t really need to work.

  ‘Would I?’ Despite the jeans, Claudia felt suddenly old. Who would want to employ a teacher on a high pay-scale who wouldn’t see sixty again?

  ‘Come on, Clo,’ Ella encouraged. ‘You’re the dangerous radical in our midst. You were in Paris in ’sixty-eight throwing paving stones! You can’t just give up because some snotty jobsworth is trying to sideline you!’

  Claudia sipped her wine and winced. The trouble was she wasn’t sure she wanted to fight back. She was beginning to feel tired. She looked around at her friends. ‘A toast.’ Claudia raised her glass. ‘To us. It was bloody amazing while it lasted.’

  ‘I’ll drink to that,’ Sal seconded. ‘But it isn’t over yet!’

  ‘Oh, come on, Sal, admit it.’ Ella shook her head. ‘We’re not middle-aged, we’re ancient.’

  ‘No we’re not. There’s no such thing as old any more. We’re YAHs – Young At Hearts. Or maybe we’re SWATS.’

  ‘I thought that was a valley in Pakistan,’ Claudia giggled.

  ‘Or some kind of police unit,’ seconded Ella.

  Sal ignored them. ‘Still Working At Sixty.’

  ‘If we are still working,’ Claudia sighed. ‘Or in your case, Sal, maybe it’s SOTs. Still Out There at Sixty.’

  ‘That makes me sound like an ageing cougar with a drink problem!’

  ‘And your point is . . . ?’ Ella teased.

  ‘Now, now,’ Laura admonished. ‘Don’t gang up on Sal.’

  ‘The thing is, we’re just not old like people have been old in the past,’ persisted Sal. ‘At my age my mother looked like the Queen – with a curly perm and twinsets. I wear jeans and shop at H&M!’

  ‘It’s true we all look nothing like our mothers did,’ Laura conceded. ‘The only way you can tell a woman’s age these days is to look at her husband!’

  ‘The thing is we may be old but we don’t feel old,’ Sal insisted, ‘that’s what makes us different. We’re the baby boomers, the Me Generation. We’ve always ripped up the rules and done it our way. Ageing isn’t inevitable any more, it’s a choice! And I, for one, am not choosing it.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Ella stretched out the arm in which she got occasional twinges of rheumatism. ‘Sometimes I do feel old.’

  ‘Nonsense! We’ll never be old. We’re the Woodstock generation! What was that Joni Mitchell song?’ Sal delved into the recesses of her memory. ‘You know, the one about being stardust and needing to get back to the Garden?’

  ‘Yes,’ Ella raised her glass. ‘Let’s just hope the Garden’s wheelchair accessible.’

  On the tube home Claudia got out her phone and set it to calculator. Yes, she was tech-savvy enough to do that, thank you, even though her daughter Gaby said she only used her phone to send nags-by-text. She roughly added up their major outgoings. If she gave up now it would damage her pension. She couldn’t help smiling at Ella’s jibe about her throwing paving stones in 1968, when here she was agonizing about pensions. What would the young Claudia have thought of that?

  But then she’d only been an accidental anarchist. In fact, she’d really been an au pair, only seventeen, trying to improve her French before A levels, staying with a well-heeled family in the smart sixteenth arrondissement. That’s when she met Thierry, best friend of the family’s son. It had been Thierry, darkly good-looking with black horn-rimmed specs and an intellectual air, who had persuaded her, on her rare day off, to come and see what the students were doing.

  Claudia, from safe suburban Surrey, had been entranced by the heady air of revolution, the witty graffiti daubed on the elegant buildings: Be realistic, demand the impossible, I am a Marxist, Groucho Tendency, and even more by the alluringly radical Thierry himself.

  It had all been so daring and exciting. She had joined hands with Thierry and his clean-cut friends in their corduroy jackets and short haircuts, not at all the standard image of revolting students, to block the Paris streets so that the hated flics couldn’t pass. She had ridden on his shoulders – like girls now did at music festivals – in the Latin Quarter with hundreds of thousands of others demanding sexual liberation and an end to paternalism.

  It all seemed a far cry from today.

  She went back to her calculations. How would they survive without her salary? Badly. At this rate, if she gave up teaching, she’d have to get a job in B&Q like all the other oldies! The most infuriating thing was that Claudia knew she was good at her job. She could enthuse her students and she was popular too. But it was true that she didn’t use new technology as much as Peter Dooley did. She wondered if she was being a Luddite. No, she remi
nded herself, I’m bloody good at what I do. And what if she did give up? She could always coach pupils at a crammer.

  But what Ella had said was true; she was still a bit of a boat-rocker and she hated privilege that could be bought by rich parents. If I give up, I’m bound to pick up some work, she told herself. But, deep down, Claudia knew that no matter how good she was, her age was beginning to tell against her.

  By the time she got home, the brief respite from her problems brought on by wine and friendship had evaporated. She walked up their garden path, noticing that the light was on in the sitting room and that, unusually, her husband Don – also a teacher, in his case of politics – was sitting at the computer underneath the cheese plant, another feisty survivor from the Sixties. The height of fashion in 1969, cheese plants were as quaint as aspidistras now, but Claudia felt an inexplicable loyalty to it and refused to chuck it out.

  She had spent most of last night moaning to him about the deputy head. In contrast to her own gloomy mood, Don seemed unusually cheery, which amazed her since recently he had been depressed about his own job. Tonight he seemed a different person.

  ‘Hello, love.’ He grinned at her, suddenly boyish. ‘I think I may have found the answer to our problems!’

  Somewhere deep inside, alarm bells rang. This wasn’t like Don. She was always the one who got things organized, made the decisions, rang the changes. Don had always been impractical, disorganized, totally disinterested in anything remotely useful. He was usually far more caught up with how to make the electoral system come alive to bored and phone-fixated teenagers than whether the roof was leaking or where they could get a better rate of interest on their modest savings. These things he left to ‘Clever Claudia’.

  Their daughter Gaby had followed his example and always turned to her mother, not her father, for loans, advice and late-night lifts.

  ‘OK,’ Claudia took off her coat and hung it in the hall cupboard. ‘So what is the answer to our problems?’

  ‘We’ll look into retiring. It’ll only be a couple of years early. They always used to be asking for volunteers among the older teachers. We cost more. They can easily replace us with some kid straight out of teacher training, then we can sell this place and downsize to Surrey, near your parents, and live on the income from our investment.’ His eyes shone like an early-day evangelist with a new parable to preach. ‘You could keep chickens!’