The Time of Their Lives Read online

  The drawers were also pulled out in the kitchen dresser and here the burglar had had more luck. The jars full of coins she’d collected for charity had gone. Well, good luck to him. He’d have to take them to one of those clanking coin change machines since the bank would never take them and there was probably only a tenner, if that.

  The container of keys had been emptied onto the kitchen table and Ella realized with a sinking heart that she’d have to get the locks changed in case he’d taken one. How the hell had he got in? Ella ran downstairs, terrified that she’d left the key in the lock. No, thank heavens, the door had been properly bolted. She rushed through the kitchen and, to her horror, the side door, only used to put out the rubbish, was indeed unlocked. Oh God, what would the girls say? Impending senility at the very least.

  Pulling herself together, she rang the police, who sounded supremely disinterested once she told them how little had been taken. ‘Is there any chance the intruder is still present?’ asked the woman at the call centre. Ella realized that if she said yes, they would be round quicker. ‘I don’t know. He might be. I live alone and it’s quite a big house.’

  As she said this two things struck Ella: that her daughter Julia would be absolutely delighted at Ella’s inefficiency and that she had no intention of telling her.

  Julia would be delighted not because she was uncaring but because it would be another nail in the coffin of this house. Too big, too impractical, worth too much money and now – unsafe for her mother to live in. Ella could just imagine the song and dance the news would create, her son-in-law Neil shaking his head and saying ‘I told you so’ in that infuriating pompous way of his, when he hadn’t said anything of the sort.

  She would get a burglar alarm and keep it to herself.

  The police, when they came round several hours later, were impeccably polite and told her she would also be visited by Victim Support and a Scene of Crime officer to take fingerprints. It was all rather exciting, except for her sense of guilt that it was her own fault. She felt as if she were part of Miss Marple. Old Moulsford might be under the Heathrow flight path but it had a distinct air of St Mary Mead.

  The only thing that scared Ella just a little was that the burglars had been round every room in the house bar hers. What if she had heard them and come out? She could have been attacked or hurt.

  Pushing the thought from her mind she made herself and the officer a cup of tea and looked through the Yellow Pages for burglar-alarm installers.

  She didn’t feel up to the allotment today after all. With cup of tea in hand she called Claudia.

  ‘You’ll never guess what. I got burgled last night.’

  ‘Ella! How awful!’ For once Claudia felt grateful for Don. He might not be the most exciting man on the planet but he would be reassuring in time of break-in. ‘What did they take?’

  ‘Virtually nothing. I’ve got zilch that’s worth stealing. I’m probably lucky he didn’t shit on my Persian rug in protest.’

  ‘Do burglars really do that?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe it’s an urban myth like discarded lovers sewing kippers in the curtains.’

  ‘Are you all right? I could pop round after school if you like.’

  ‘I’m waiting for the Scene of Crime officer. Or was it the Victim Support people?’

  ‘Golly.’

  ‘By the way, don’t breathe a word to Julia whatever you do.’

  ‘I quite understand. You don’t want to worry her. But wouldn’t she want to be worried?’

  ‘Julia would like nothing more. She’s desperate for me to sell up and hand over the dosh so that their pompous little boys can stay at their school and get truly insufferable. This burglary would be another brick in the wall.’

  ‘What about Cory?’

  ‘Cory would panic and move in. Then she’d be more scared than I am. I’m keeping the whole thing quiet and installing an alarm. In fact, they’re coming this afternoon. Then I have to remember another bloody PIN code or I’ll set the alarm off accidentally. I hope I don’t turn into some dithering old lady who can’t even remember the date of her own birthday.’

  ‘You’re not supposed to use your birthday anyway. Do you know half the population use one two three four?’

  ‘How sweet. You have to love people, don’t you?’

  ‘I’m glad you’re getting an alarm. We’re not as young as we were.’

  ‘I know, only don’t tell Sal. Actually, burglars aren’t so scary. I just hope I don’t get one of those granny rapists. I’d just have to say “Look here, young man, I’m really eighty, I’ve just got that disease like Brad Pitt in Benjamin Button.”’

  By the end of the day Ella had been given helpful hints by the Scene of Crime officer that she should tack carpet grip on her garden gate which, though it wouldn’t stop a burglar, would cut him so badly that they could get good DNA evidence; from the neighbour on one side that she should play a tape of a barking dog; and from the neighbour on the other that she should keep a baseball bat by her bed as did the other half of the population who didn’t use one two three four as their PIN code.

  The man from Banham’s just said she should keep the alarm on at all times, day or night.

  Ella ignored them all, put it on only when she went to bed, and mourned the time when you could leave your door unlocked and not wake up to find your plasma screen had disappeared in the night.

  ‘Mum, you’ve got a burglar alarm,’ Cory commented when she came round for supper the next week.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why is that? Are you frightened of living on your own?’

  With all the deftness of a computer gamer, Ella assessed the pitfalls in giving the wrong answer. ‘No, I’m fine living alone. I thought you girls would worry about me less if I had an alarm.’

  ‘Absolutely. You’re very precious, you know, Mum.’

  Ella, who since losing Laurence had learned to keep her emotions under strict control in case they overwhelmed her, felt suddenly unbearably moved. ‘Come and have a hug.’

  Cory smiled tolerantly. ‘Mum, you old softie.’ But she let herself be hugged all the same.

  Unfortunately, the effect was somewhat reduced by the phone going. Cory grabbed it before her mother could.

  She held it out to Ella. ‘It’s someone from the local nick,’ she raised a cynical eyebrow, ‘about the break-in here the other night, do you need victim support or counselling?’

  Sal’s alarm woke her at 7.30 as usual, the comforting tones of Radio 4 assuring her that all was familiar with the world. Her bedroom was equally soothing: every shade of grey from wispy-white to smoke, with a luxurious gunmetal velvet bedspread. Her trademark pale pink roses stood in a large and extravagant-looking bunch on her dressing table, though how much longer would she be able to afford them? She always insisted on a dedicated dressing table where make-up could be applied in the proper light.

  Then she remembered that things weren’t the same at all. In her entire adult life she had never been without a job for more than a few weeks, a month at the most. OK, sometimes she’d done a bit of freelancing, but that had been to top up an existing salary, to pay for an unexpected minibreak, or maybe a Mulberry handbag which she had reckoned she could buy with two broadsheet articles or a large tabloid one.

  She wondered how far the news of her sacking had spread. There was no gossip more relished in the media world than a head rolling at the top. Of course, editors came and went with fairly startling speed. Everyone knew the game and being fired wasn’t necessarily the end of the road.

  Unless you were over sixty.

  There. She’d said it. The ‘S’ word, one she rarely allowed into her mind, let alone onto her lips. Age had always seemed irrelevant to Sal; she had never considered it a factor even when she was a young writer starting out. Ideas were the thing, being in touch with what interested the readers, noticing what was new in the world, and what people cared about.

  Certainly struggling with new technology was
an issue. When she’d first started fresh from college they had used manual typewriters with carbon paper for copies. Her job had been simply to produce ideas and copy. There were plenty of designers, production people and sub-editors to lay it out, check it and send it off to the printers in Glasgow.

  Everything was different now; they had to input their own copy, lay it out and sub-edit it themselves using hideously complicated new equipment. She had kept quiet the other day when Claudia recounted how she’d been accused of being out of touch with technology, but it had certainly rung a bell.

  Sal slumped back on her cushions. They had been a reader offer in the magazine. She picked one up and threw it at the wall, almost knocking over her roses as she did so.

  ‘Bloody Marian and Maurice!’

  In the dim and distant past, when she’d needed a job she’d opened up her Filofax (no one possessed one of these now, yet Sal could remember when everyone had to have one) and contacted all the useful people she could think of. Now it was email, of course. Or tweeting. Or LinkedIn.

  Sal buried her head under the pillow. She didn’t feel like having to go through all that. She was too old! Too tired!

  Reality seeped in through her cloud-grey curtains. Money. How was she going to pay the bills? The downside of refusing to accept that she was sixty was that she hadn’t planned for it. She would be entitled to a state pension at some point, but that wouldn’t even keep her in white wine! Having grown up in poverty she had a horror of returning there.

  Suddenly the topic of pensions, and indeed of ageing at all, which had interested her as much as the football results, felt entirely gripping.

  Sal sat up. She felt righteous indignation well up inside her. This was always a good sign. Her best pieces had come out of feelings just like this. Getting a parking ticket from some jobsworth ten seconds after the time limit had expired. Paying for a massage and finding that she was pummelled so hard it was like medieval torture and she had ached for days! Being ignored by a bored and haughty waiter in a restaurant that boasted good service! These had all made excellent rants for which she had been well rewarded. None were about world-changing issues but they had had their impact.

  And now she was getting all riled up about something that did matter. Still in her grey silk pyjamas, another reader offer, Sal made a quick coffee and sat down at her computer screen.

  An hour later she realized that the coffee had gone cold but she had written a stonking article on ageism in the workplace. Older employees everywhere were terrified because they were ‘out of touch with technology’ and they should be given training to help them adapt. Of course they were bloody out of touch with technology! Admiral Nelson would have been useless with a sub-machine gun! Einstein himself would have struggled with a MacBook Pro!

  Sal felt the familiar joy of a good piece, well argued. New technology, which she had just spent the last hour lambasting, now offered her a choice. Should she think about it in a mature way, given her newly precarious position, i.e., joblessness, or just bang it off to some of her contacts in the hope of publication? They would immediately guess that she had been fired, as would the entire journalistic community once they read it. Righteous anger in a journalist was usually the result of outrage at being treated just like an ordinary person.

  Sod it! Sal pressed the Send button, feeling better at once. Now she would have a bath and get dressed; maybe she’d go to the little café at the end of the road where she never had time to linger in the mornings and have an over-priced latte.

  Life wasn’t so bad after all.

  An hour later, after she’d drunk her latte and watched all the yummy mummies crowding into the café with their vast double buggies, moaning on about their children’s demanding social lives, regret started to set in.

  She was sixty-three, she had no husband to support her like these young women, no children to help her out in old age, no proper pension because she had spent it all on clothes and shoes, and now she had written a piece that trumpeted the fact that she had been fired. Was she terminally self-destructive?

  She decided to call someone who would sympathize.

  ‘Hello, Claudia.’

  ‘Sal?’ Claudia sounded surprised. Sal never called her in the morning. She was always too busy at work. Claudia was only home because it was half-term.

  ‘Everything all right?’

  ‘Well, no, actually. I’ve been fired. Or rather, technically my contract will not be renewed.’

  ‘Sal, no! Why?’

  ‘The same reason your deputy head prefers that Dooley bloke. Ageism dressed up as not being tech-savvy. I am insufficiently “platform-neutral”, it seems.’

  ‘What does that gobbledegook mean?’

  ‘It means they want some teenager who grew up with the Internet. Producing a mere magazine is not enough. We have to be online. We must tweet. We must have our own TV channel even though the TV channels are becoming more like magazines every day. Do you know you can even buy things direct from the TV now? It’s called convergence, according to Marian. And it means I don’t have a job.’

  ‘I wonder if there’s a message coming through to us all here.’

  ‘There is. It’s called Get Thee to a Garden Centre with All the Other Old Folks.’

  ‘Oh, Sal. So you’re sitting at home feeling miserable. Tell you what, let’s go to The Retreat! A spa day is just what you need to cheer you up; something you can’t usually do because you’re too busy.’ Claudia realized she was beginning to sound like her mother which meant she really was joining the ranks of the retired.

  ‘I haven’t been to The Retreat in twenty years. No, make it thirty.’

  It was an extravagance, Claudia had to admit, and she would insist on paying while she still could. Anyway, there were moments when friendship mattered more than money. She suddenly thought of her mother’s penchant for offers. Maybe one was available at The Retreat.

  ‘They’re bound to let us in cheap. Spas are full of wrinklies like my mum these days, all brandishing their half-price vouchers. If Martha Lane Fox hadn’t dreamed up Lastminute.com my mother would have done it for her.’

  Two hours later, Sal found herself wrapped in a white terry robe, lying on a towel-draped chaise-longue, trying to position herself so that her neck didn’t look like a broiling chicken’s and hoping her mascara wouldn’t run in the steam room.

  Claudia was right. All around them were the over-fifties. More sensible over-fifties than Sal. Women with pensions and husbands and houses to fund a little luxury in their retirement. Sal tried to repress a sudden ripple of fear. What the hell was she going to do? She had already borrowed heavily to put in an en-suite bathroom. It had been a great success and she knew it would make the flat more desirable. Except that she didn’t want to make her flat desirable to somebody else! The idea of moving to some poky studio with the fridge in the bedroom to save money was hideous in the extreme.

  The memory of her parents in their last years came vividly back to her, eternally economizing, and never putting the heating on unless their breath showed inside the house. But Sal was a working woman, things were supposed to be different for her generation!

  ‘Here.’ Claudia handed her one of The Retreat’s famous Bellinis. ‘They’re not bad. Though not as good as Laura’s. She uses fresh peach juice.’

  Laura! In all the worry and excitement, Sal had forgotten the scene that had preceded, maybe even contributed, to her sacking. ‘Claudia, in The Ivy, where my employers thoughtfully took me to sack me, I saw Simon. He was with another woman! And the bastard was kissing her, right there in front of the whole restaurant. I mean, doing that in The Ivy, it’s like taking an ad out in The Times.’

  ‘Simon? You mean Laura’s Simon? Oh my God. What was she like?’

  ‘Claudia, she was lethal! Thirtysomething and gorgeous. I could hear her biological clock ticking right across the restaurant!’

  ‘Oh shit, and I’ve always laughed at Laura’s obsession with men leaving their wives
. She’s convinced it’s an epidemic, like buying a Land Rover in Central London.’

  ‘Maybe she had a premonition.’

  Claudia shook her head. ‘No. That’s the worst bit. She’s convinced she and Simon are rock solid.’

  ‘Do you think we should tell her? We are her best friends.’

  Claudia bit her lip. ‘No. Having your friend tell you your husband’s being unfaithful makes you feel twice as humiliated. As if you’re the last to know. It’s bound to come out if he’s being that public about it. Stupid bastard.’

  ‘Bloody love.’

  ‘Not bloody love. Bloody men. You’d think after all that time together he’d have some loyalty.’ Claudia drained her Bellini. ‘The trouble is men know they can start all over again. Look at Picasso. Women think, Christ, I’ve got another thirty years, I’d better take up gardening. Men think, I’ve got another thirty years, I know, time for a new wife and kids.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s what Simon’s thinking. I think the stupid sod believes she’s after his body.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter what Simon believes, though, does it? If you’re right and this woman wants a baby, she won’t think twice about breaking up his marriage. I’ve seen it over and over. Wives are expendable. Simon probably thinks he’s entitled to a shiny new family.’

  ‘Oh God, poor Laura.’

  ‘Poor Laura indeed. We’d better be standing by to pick up the pieces.’

  Laura hummed to herself, feeling happier than she had for months. Not only did she have this surprise up her sleeve for Simon, but Sam had announced he actually wanted to watch a film with her, and Bella, who had been uncommunicative and surly lately, had suddenly asked if Laura would pick her up at 4 p.m. She would phone before with the address.

  Even though it was late afternoon, their slightly unfashionable suburb was bathed in golden light. Sunshine spilled over the black and white mock-Tudor houses, and even the High Street, in decline in the face of stiff competition from the Retail Park, looked attractive, despite one in three of its premises being charity shops. Even the half-timbered McDonald’s had an optimistic glow.