Two Times Twenty

Chapter 1

The thing about being forty is that I don’t feel that much different from the way I felt at twenty. Really I don’t. I still like the same food I liked when I was twenty and I still have the same lefty views, more or less. OK, admittedly a bit less nowadays. I still drink too much of a Saturday evening and when I’m with my parents I still feel that they’re the grown-ups really. Even though I’ve got kids of my own now, I’m still the me I was when I was twenty. Except, of course, when I look in the mirror and see the size of my arse and the bags under my eyes. The mirror tells me for a fact that I’m not the same me I was when I was twenty. I might feel like I did back then but I’ve lived a whole lot longer and a whole lot harder since and it shows. Boy does it show.

Turning forty is a big deal. Forty is a birthday that forces you to climb up on the shoulders of your life and from that steep and craggy vantage point look back over your past. And if when you get up there you find you don’t like what you see, you’d damn well better choose where you go next more carefully.

Perhaps that’s why my fortieth birthday was so important to me. Because, my children aside, I was distinctly underwhelmed with what I had to show for my first thirty-nine years on the planet. Or perhaps it was because it was dawning on me that forty was halfway to eighty and that made me officially middle-aged, with the best half already lived. Whatever the reason, I decided that what I needed for my fortieth was a party. A cheesy party, with a disco and flashing lights and a cake with candles, to which I could invite just about every person in my life who mattered to me and quite a lot of people besides who didn’t matter at all. The kind of party at which I could shake my fist in the face of death while I still had the chance.

Persuading the publican at my local to let me take over his entire pub for the night of my birthday was not easy. He was worried about his regulars.

‘That’s a Saturday night Anna. I can’t close for a private party on a Saturday. How about a night in the week instead? Thursday night is the new Friday night, apparently.’

‘I want people to have fun Steve.’ I did a little step to the left, another to the right. ‘You know, do a little dance, get down tonight, that sort of thing. Not sip a pineapple juice and slope off home for the 10 o’clock news because they’ve got to go to work the next day. And parties just aren’t the same if they’re not on the actual day.’

‘But you know how it is round here Anna. People take offence easily. If they turn up on a Saturday night and get turned away they’ll be off down the Royal Oak and the next thing you know I’m out of business. I couldn’t risk it love. Commercial suicide.’ Steve tugged his shirt nervously over his beer belly. Even with a bit of a gut, Steve’s a nice-looking bloke with kind eyes and long legs but he will insist on wearing black shirts because he thinks they make him look thinner when in fact they make him look like a darts player.

‘Oh come on Steve! My birthday’s not till July. You’ve got the best part of three months to warn your customers you’ll be closed for a private party that Saturday night. Half of them will be invited anyway. I’m going to put a stash of money behind the bar so you’re bound to take more than you would do normally. And I hope you’ll be there? As a guest that is, not working the bar. I tell you what, if a real regular turns up for a drink we’ll just let them come in and join the party. How’s that?’

‘I don’t know Anna.’

I played my trump card. ‘All the girls from the aerobics class will be there.’

There hadn’t been a Mrs Steve for quite some time.

‘All of them?’ he smiled at me.

‘Every single one.’

Got him!

It was hardly a high-society venue I was negotiating for. It’s a local pub, like thousands of other local pubs across the country. It has a snug where the old boys drink and a lounge bar, where the rest of us go, with a flowery maroon carpet and wooden tables and chairs sticky with dark-brown varnish. There’s a gambler, a juke box and a fag machine. There’s a small kitchen and, strictly between 12.30pm and 2pm only, Steve serves things with frozen chips – steak and kidney pie, gammon and egg, sausage and beans. That was another reason I wanted the pub as a venue for my party – I knew that I could persuade Steve to let my friend Jane do the catering because he wouldn’t want to do it himself for love nor money.

Jane wouldn’t normally contemplate catering at pubs. She runs a very classy catering company, doing the food for society weddings and posh christenings and swanky business launches.Fortieth birthday parties at local pubs would usually be far beneath her but she had offered to cater for my party as her birthday present to me.

‘Are you sure about this?’ I asked her when I called round with the good news that Steve had relented and I could have the pub the night of my birthday. ‘It’s incredibly generous of you. Won’t you be losing a fortune doing that for me on a Saturday night?’

‘Not really,’ Jane reassured me, ‘I’ll make a few extra canapés every time I do a client gig from now on and freeze them and before long I’ll have a freezer-full especially for you. I’ll make mini Yorkshire puddings with roast beef, gruyere crostini and baby tomato bruschetta and some of those little sausages with marmalade glaze that you love so much.’

I imagined the faces of some of Steve’s regulars turning up for their usual four pints of IPA and instead being offered a glass of white wine and little bits of toasted bread. Foreign food and a girl’s drink would have them scurrying down the Royal Oak faster than being excluded from the pub altogether.

‘Jane, it all sounds absolutely delicious. I’d be at least a size 24 if I did your job. I’m only sorry the pub won’t be as classy as your food.’

‘Don’t you worry about that,’ Jane said, ‘I can sort that out no problem. I’ve got some fairy lights left over from a wedding we did last year where the bride was a bit older than the groom and didn’t want any natural light; we’ll put those up all over the pub and they’ll flicker and twinkle romantically and hide the nicotine stains on the ceilings. And we can go down the flower market and buy some flowers wholesale – I’ve got loads of plain glass vases we can put them in – and we’ll dot them all around, get some lilies so that the place smells nice. Don’t worry Anna, I promise I can turn even Steve’s pub into a fairy grotto. Just you wait. It’ll be perfect.’

We were sitting at her kitchen table, drinking a bottle of Chablis that was chilled exactly right. Cold but not so cold that you couldn’t taste the flavour of the wine. That’s one of Jane’s many skills – she knows how to serve wine at the right temperature. Not only is her white wine always perfectly chilled but her red wine is always velvety smooth and somehow just the right side of warm, slipping lusciously and easily down your throat. I’ve asked her to share the knack with me dozens of times but she claims she doesn’t do anything special, you just put white wine in the fridge and with red wine you open it and leave it on the kitchen counter for a short while before serving. I think that’s where I must be going wrong. Any wine that arrives at my house goes directly from shopping bag to glass. Doesn’t pass Go. Doesn’t collect £200.

You know how sometimes when you’ve known someone for a long time you stop looking at them? I mean you look at them but you don’t really see them. And then all of a sudden you see them again in a different light, as if for the first time. Like a stranger might. That’s how I felt that evening, looking at Jane. She was wearing a beautifully tailored, navy wool pinstripe suit with wide-legged trousers, a short fitted jacket and high-heeled boots and she was balancing a slim folder on her knee, scribbling in it as we talked, making a list of the things she was going to organise for my party. Her shoulder-length, honey-blonde hair, glossy and perfectly straight, fell across her face as she worked, and as she absentmindedly hooked a strand behind her ear I suddenly thought: This is what you do for a living and you are really good at it. You are a really successful business woman, not just my friend who lives down the road who I’ve known for years and take for granted, and you do this every day and you do it well. You fill every single one of your customers with confidence that you will make their special event absolutely perfect, like you just did to me. Wow.

Affection and gratitude rushed through me. ‘Thanks for this Jane. I really appreciate it.’ I reached forward, squeezed her pinstriped knee gently. ‘You and Bob will be my guests of honour.’

‘Well I’ll definitely be there. Can’t be sure about Bob. He’s usually ready for his bed by 8pm.’

A voice called from the living room.

‘Don’t listen to her Anna. I wouldn’t miss your birthday shindig for the world. I’ll have a nap in the afternoon if needs be.’

‘Nothing wrong with your ears is there Bob Price?’ Jane called back. ‘Do you fancy a glass of wine? Anna and I have just about finished in here.’

‘Only if you two join me.’

‘Is that an invite to your boudoir Mr Price?’ I asked.

‘Certainly is.’

I waited for Jane to pour a small measure of wine into a half pint glass and plop in a straw and then the two of us went to sit with Bob in what had once been the Prices’ living room but which for a little while had acted as Bob’s bedroom. Bob was sitting in his favourite armchair, one with a high, straight back and wings. It had once been part of a three-piece suite they’d got when they first moved into the house and it was very out of fashion and a bit grubby in places, but Bob had insisted it was saved from the dump when Jane decided its matching companions had had their day. It was about the only piece of furniture in the room that was not specially adapted and it gave Bob pleasure still to be able to sit in it comfortably.

He smiled at us both, a big, wide welcoming grin that made his eyes crinkle. Bob is still a very handsome man, his olive skin smooth and almost totally unlined, with just the faintest of wrinkles around his eyes and along his forehead. His thick hair, which was dark brown when I first met him, is now mostly iron grey but there is lots of it and the hairdresser who comes to the house is excellent and gives Bob a very short youthful cut which Bob claims makes him look like George Clooney. Jane handed him his wine and I tried not to look away as Bob struggled to hold the glass straight, clamping his lips over the straw and taking a big suck.

‘Chablis. A very good one too. Jane must like you a lot Anna. She usually only gives me boring old Chardonnay. You should come round more often.’

‘Nothing wrong with your taste buds either is there?’ I joked.

‘Not a bloody thing. It’s just the rest of me that’s totally useless,’ Bob said without a hint of self pity.

Chapter 2

Bob and Jane moved into our street about a month or so after I had my second son, Niall. He was due the last week of August and I remember clearly how alien my body felt that summer as I waited for him to arrive, stretched and aching and so much more of me than there used to be, hips and belly and breasts bunching around me and slowing me down. The only summer clothes that fitted me were two ugly cotton maternity frocks that my mother had given me and that I’d had no intention of ever wearing. I wore one and washed the other every day. The dresses got thinner and softer with every wash and their faded patterns grew familiar and dear to me. As the school holidays drew to a close, the final precious days, heavy with sunshine and ripe as a peach, slipped away like water through cupped fingers, and I had to accept that my second child was going to be the oldest in his school year and not the youngest.

He finally arrived, eight days late, on the second of September. He did not sleep well and woke often during the night. In the day I was so tired that there was a constant buzzing in my ears and my arms and legs were awkward and clumsy, as if I was wearing layers of thick, padded ski-wear which left no room for my knees or elbows to bend properly. If I sat down my eyes would grow heavy and start to close and then my head would suddenly jerk forward and I’d realise I must have fallen asleep. It could only have been for a few seconds at most, not even that probably, but my inability to stay awake scared me. I was meant to be in charge of two babies. So I stopped sitting down.

Have you ever had a couple of glasses of wine in the afternoon, sitting outside somewhere in the sun, and suddenly felt a great wave of tiredness come over you, a wave so big that you want to lie down on the grass there and then and just let it rush over you, give in to instant sleep? That’s how I felt for weeks after Niall arrived. Every day was the same, the same drugged tiredness and the same endless round of feeding and wiping and burping. All of it one long, blurry, milky haze.

The arrival of a new family in our street was a welcome distraction. It wasn’t just me. Everyone wanted to see the people who were finally moving into poor old Violet’s house. It had taken ever such a long time to sell after she died, due, apparently, to a disagreement between her two daughters-in-law about how much it should fetch. In the end some builder from Cardiff had bought it and there had been several months of dust and loud banging and a succession of rusty skips taking up precious parking space before finally it was back on the market and this time it sold within weeks. No one had liked seeing an empty house in our street, its windows dark and lonely at night, and as soon as the sound of a removal van was heard trundling up the road, my neighbours spilled out of their homes, ready to greet the newcomers. Ours is a friendly street where people look out for each other. This is spin doctor speak for a bunch of nosy buggers who seem to spend more time than is healthy sitting in their front rooms looking out through their nets and clocking what everyone is getting up to. It’s not that bad really – not being able to smuggle fancy men into my house unnoticed is a small price to pay for the privilege of neighbours who take in parcels for me and go round my house closing curtains and switching lights on and off when we’re away. They probably steam open my post while they’re at it but that’s the way life is. You’ve got to take the rough with the smooth.

Following behind the removal van was a Volvo estate, a long clunk of a car that made almost as much noise as the removal van. However curious I was about the new family moving in I promise I’m not a curtain twitcher – but I happened to be in my front window trying to rock Niall off for his afternoon sleep. I watched as the new family got out of their car. Tall dark-haired dad, petite blonde mum with a big curly perm and two boys aged somewhere between about eight and ten, dark like their father. I remember there was a lot of laughing going on and that dad was trying to carry mum over the threshold but she was resisting, only finally giving in when dad got hold of both her arms and her sons grabbed a leg each and all three of them carried her over together. I remember feeling envious of all their energy and thinking that this family looked like a lot of fun. And so they proved to be. An awful lot of fun.

I didn’t go round with an apple pie or anything but I did stir myself enough to knock on their door a couple of days later, my two babies stashed neatly in their double push chair.

‘Hi, I’m Anna, I live at number 34. Just wanted to welcome you to the street.’

‘Lovely to meet you. I’m Jane. Come on in. Have a cup of tea.’

‘That’s very kind of you but I won’t thanks all the same. It’s taken me half an hour to get these two into this pram and I can’t face getting them out again.’

Jane laughed.

‘I remember when my two were small like that. How long between them – two years?’

‘Not even that!’

‘Isn’t it the most wonderful and the most terrible thing you’ve ever done?’

I smiled at her but tears were pricking at the back of my eyes and she must have been able to see that.

‘Here, let me,’ and she grabbed hold of the buggy, kicked the brake off with practised ease, and wheeled it round. ‘Let’s go round the back way and we can have a cup of tea in the garden.’

She manoeuvred my tank of a pram down the side of their house, past a teetering pile of empty cardboard boxes, and into their small back garden. All the houses in our street have tiny gardens – the Victorians obviously didn’t care much for outdoor living – but Violet had never been much of a gardener and the builder hadn’t bothered at all. Thick, overgrown creepers bulged down both sides of the narrow garden making it even smaller, and a tatty shed took up at least a third of it.

‘It’s a mess, isn’t it?’ Jane caught me looking. ‘A real shandy van.’

‘Not much worse than mine is,’ I laughed.

‘Well, first things first. I’ve got a thousand boxes to unpack before I’ll be able to tackle out here.’

‘That’ll take you to Christmas then.’

‘At least,’ she sighed. ‘Right, let’s get that tea. Bob! Bob! Come out here and meet our neighbour Anna! Put the kettle on as you go past.’

From inside the kitchen a man’s voice called.

‘Jane. I can’t find the kettle!’

‘Neither can I. Use the pan on the stove that we’ve been using since the day we got here.’ She looked at me, lifted her eyes upwards. ‘Honestly. Just goes to show how much tea he makes. I put the kettle and the corkscrew in a separate box so I could find them easily the minute we moved in and I haven’t seen hide or hair of that box since we left Cardiff.’

The tall man I’d last seen struggling to get his wife over the threshold came out into the garden, wiped his hand on the seat of his trousers and stuck it out towards me.

‘Hello Anna. I’m Bob.’

He was the kind of man you looked at twice. Broad shouldered and thick of thigh with a big mop of dark hair and dark brown eyes to match.

‘Who are these two then?’ he said peering into the pram.

‘This one’s James – he’ll be two in November – and this one’s Niall – he’s just four weeks old.’

‘Duw, good-sized boys for their age you’ve got there Anna. Make good rugby players one day.’

Jane flicked her husband on the arm. ‘Good god Bob Price! Do you ever stop thinking about rugby?’

‘Only when I’m busy thinking about other things, love,’ he said, giving her a big wink, and then went back into the kitchen to make the tea.

I felt comfortable with Bob and Jane right from the beginning. As we sat in their dark, overgrown little garden drinking lukewarm tea, Jane rocked the pram gently and automatically, as if she didn’t even know she was doing it. It was lovely not to have to do that for once – just to be able to sit there and drink my tea – and the boys nodded off very shortly.

‘Would you like to come in and see the house?’ Jane asked. ‘Bob will sit out here with these two in case they wake up.’

‘Love to,’ I said, following her inside.

The builder had transformed the house, knocking Violet’s little scullery and dining room into one big kitchen with fitted units and an expanse of terracotta tiled floor, cool and inviting as a Tuscany villa. The two little living rooms had also been knocked into one to make a big airy family living space where Jane’s two sons were sitting cross-legged on the floor watching telly.

‘Our three-piece suite doesn’t arrive till next week,’ Jane explained. ‘Daniel! Rhys! Say hello to Anna our neighbour.’

‘Hello Anna,’ they said in unison without looking up from the telly.

Jane sighed. ‘Make the most of those babies, Anna, because before you know it this is what they turn into – monosyllabic morons. I’m letting them watch all the telly they want today because they start their new school tomorrow.’

Upstairs, thanks to a loft conversion that ran the entire length of the house, the Prices had four bedrooms to my three and two bathrooms.

‘Wow. This place is wonderful.’

‘Isn’t it great?’ Jane said proudly. ‘The builders might not have been gardeners but they did some great work inside. We just had a ground-floor flat in Cardiff and I can’t believe how much more space we’ve got.’

‘Lucky you,’ I said jealously. ‘Our house is going to feel tiny and horribly old fashioned now that I’ve seen this.’

‘I’m sorry for showing off,’ Jane said, ‘but I just can’t help myself. I’m so chuffed with it.’

‘Don’t blame you. I would be too.’

Through the open landing window the sound of James wailing floated up.

‘Oops, better get back out there and relieve your husband.’ I dashed back down the stairs to find Bob pushing the pram with one foot, Niall still fast asleep in it, whilst joggling James up and down on his other leg.

‘There you go handsome, here’s your mam now,’ he said handing me my elder son who by now was no longer crying but looking quizzically up at Bob.

‘You’re a star, Bob. Thanks so much and thanks for the tea. I’ll be on my way now, let you get on with those boxes. I hope you’ll be very happy in your new home. It’s a fabulous house. Thank you, Jane.’

‘You’re welcome. You must come again some time. Come round with your husband for dinner one night and Bob’ll make his beef in Guinness stew. It’s his speciality. By which I mean it’s the only thing he knows how to cook.’

‘That’d be lovely. We’d like that.’

I was newly married back then, the divorce still a long way off, and I remember excitedly telling my husband when he got home from work about the new family that had moved in to our street.

‘They sound nice,’ he said, trying hard to sound interested.

I didn’t bother describing the strong connection I felt with Bob and Jane, right from that very first meeting. It would have sounded silly anyway, like I’d fallen in love at first sight or something, but in a way that’s what it was. Friendship at first sight anyway. I knew from the very beginning that Bob and Jane were going to become true friends. Friends that would insist I came down the pub with them on a Saturday night rather than stay at home on my own with the kids, that would pop round at the end of the month with a slab of lasagne, a chocolate roulade and a bottle of wine that were ‘left over and a shame to waste’, that would tell me without a flicker of the eye that I looked really good two days after having a baby when I patently looked like a beached whale. That would never say they told me so when they so easily could.

About eight years ago Bob started to complain of stiff muscles. Jane just teased him at first, asking him what did he expect? He was in his late thirties and much as she adored him it shouldn’t come as a surprise if he didn’t have quite the same energy levels as he’d had when they were first married. If he was feeling stiff he should go to the gym a bit more and sample fewer of her canapés. But when his legs started to shake and he couldn’t feel down one side any longer Jane realised that it was no laughing matter and insisted he saw their GP. The GP in turn insisted Bob saw a neurologist and finally three months later Bob was diagnosed with MS.

At first, even though we all knew Bob had MS you could barely tell. He just walked a bit more carefully than usual, like it was raining and the pavement was a bit slippy, and he and Jane went on with their lives much as they always had. Bob continued to teach English at Cardiff University and Jane carried on with her catering business. They still came down to Steve’s pub on a Saturday night and went on holidays to the same cottage in West Wales they’d been going to since Daniel and Rhys were tiny. They were both so positive after Bob’s diagnosis I often forgot that he had MS at all. So, it seemed, did Bob. His career at the University went from strength to strength and he got made a professor. He continued to coach his sons both in their school work and at rugby, and they repaid him by excelling at both. Bob proudly drove them all over South Wales to matches, standing on the sidelines with all the other fathers, weathering the rain and wind with the help of a flask of coffee and an enormous golfing umbrella.

Then, two years ago, Bob suffered a major relapse and in a matter of weeks he needed a stick and then two sticks and then suddenly he couldn’t walk by himself at all. His driving licence was taken away from him but Bob just joked that this was perfect timing on his part because Daniel had just passed his test and now he didn’t need to buy a car for him. By Christmas last year Bob finally acknowledged that not only did he need a wheelchair but he also needed to accept the University’s offer of early retirement on the grounds of ill health. The process had been so gradual and so slow that sometimes I forgot how much Bob had deteriorated until I stopped and thought back on how he used to be, how he was that first day I met him, so tall and handsome. A man so athletic and fit that when he threw a ball around the park with his sons the grace and precision of his movements were a pleasure to watch.

To see him now, his muscles wasted away and his legs no longer working, one hand lying in his lap virtually useless, his one good hand gripping a half-pint glass of Chablis which he had to sip through a straw, was one of the most pitiful things I’d ever seen but I made sure that no pity showed in my face. Because pity was the thing that Bob despised most of all about his