that I’m lying about my age to try and get a job. Deb reports that she does the same if she wants to get a man.
‘Seriously, you never give your true age?’
‘Never, ever ever,’ says Deb. Stabbing miserably at the last rocket leaf on her plate, she picks it up and pops it in her mouth before licking the dressing from her finger. We both ordered salad and sparkling water, no bread, because our thirty-year college reunion, which for so long felt a safe distance away, is approaching fast. But now Deb starts doing urgent, smiley semaphore at the waiter, indicating she wants wine.
‘What if you look amazing for your age?’ I ask.
She gives a bitter laugh – a harsh, cawing sound I can’t remember hearing before. ‘That’s even worse. If you look good for your age you’ll probably be vain enough to give it away. So you arrange to meet up, he takes you for dinner, you have a few glasses of wine, candles, it’s getting romantic and he says, “God, you’re gorgeous”, and you’re feeling relaxed and probably a bit drunk and you really like him and you think “this one’s sensitive, not shallow like some of the others”, so you get carried away and you say, “Pretty good for fifty, huh?”’
‘Well, it’s true you do look fabulous,’ I say. (She is terribly changed since the last time we met, on my birthday. She looks so red and puffy. It’s a drinker’s face, I realise for the first time. Oh, Deb.)
‘Doesn’t matter,’ Debra says, wagging a cautionary finger. ‘So the guy does a charming, funny double-take and he gives a wolf whistle and he agrees that you are, indeed, incredibly well-preserved for fifty. No one could possibly guess. I mean, Totally Amazing. Then you see it. The panic rising behind his eyes. And he’s thinking, “Omigod, how did I not notice that? The lines around her mouth, the scrawny neck. She definitely looks fifty. And I’m only forty-six, so she’s an older woman. Plus, she lied on her profile”. Oh, waiter, waiter, sorry, can I get a glass of wine here? Sauvignon Blanc. Join me, Kate, please?’
‘I can’t, I’ve got Women Returners later.’
‘Then you definitely need alcohol. Two glasses of white, please. Large? Yes, thanks.’
‘And then what happens?’
‘And then he throws you back in the sea and goes fishing for a younger one.’
‘Well, at least you know he’s not the man for you if he’s going to reject you just because of your age.’
‘Oh, Kate, Kate, my sweet deluded girl, they’re all like that.’ Another mirthless cackle. Deb reaches across the table and taps me affectionately on the nose, which hurts a bit. It’s the part of the bone where Ben bit me when he was taking his first steps. I knelt down to catch him in case he fell and he staggered towards me like a tiny drunk, tried to kiss my mouth and got my nose instead. A tiny, tooth-shaped scar marks the spot.
‘What you don’t understand, darling, in your married bliss with Ricardo, is that when guys get to our age they hold all the cards.’
(It’s the perfect opening to tell her how bad things are between me and Richard, but I don’t, not yet. I can hardly bear to tell myself.)
Deb knocks back her wine with a complaint about the small measures, then reaches out her hand and pours most of my untouched one into her own glass. ‘A man of forty-eight isn’t interested in a woman the same age. Why would he be when he can maybe pick up someone in the twenty-nine to thirty-six category? A fifty-year-old man can still tick, “May want children one day”. What can I tick? “May need a hysterectomy if I keep bleeding like a stuck pig”? Anyway, cheers, my dear!’ She clinks both glasses together, hands me my almost empty one and takes several gulps from her own.
I’ve known Debra since our third week at college when we got chatting in the bar and found out that we shared the same boyfriend. We should have been sworn enemies, but we decided we liked each other much better than the boy, who was doubly dumped and would forever after be known as Two-Time Ted.
I was bridesmaid when Deb married Jim. I was godmother to their first child and chief mourner at the divorce after Jim went off with a twenty-seven-year-old broker from Hong Kong when Felix was six and Ruby was three. Deb feels guilty because Felix suffers with anxiety and blames himself for the break-up of the marriage. He has a lot of trouble fitting in at school and Deb keeps moving him (three times in the last five years), probably because it’s easier to believe the school’s the problem than your child. Deb often refers to Felix’s ADHD diagnosis as if it explains everything. I think (though would never say) that, with Jim not around, she found it hard to control the boy’s behaviour and she spent a fortune on PlayStations and every gizmo you can imagine to keep him happy while she worked. I was horrified, last Christmas, at the size of the TV Deb gave Felix, so much bigger than their family one. She spends almost nothing on herself. Felix, now seventeen, looks exactly like Jim, which can’t help. Deb loves her son although, increasingly, I suspect she doesn’t like him very much.
‘Go on, tell me about “Women Returners”, then?’ I can practically hear the ironic quotation marks Deb puts around my support group.
‘I know you think I don’t need it.’
‘You don’t need it, Kate. You just need to get yourself out there and stop sublimating all that ambition of yours into renovating some crazy old house.’
‘I thought I was bringing life back to a period gem of considerable potential in need of sensitive updating.’
‘Is that you or the house, darling?’
‘Both. Can’t you tell?’
She laughs properly, like herself this time, a warm, generous sound which is incongruous in this fashionable palace of steel and glass. I love Deb’s laugh; it reminds me of so many times we’ve shared.
‘Suit yourself,’ she says. ‘Can’t think of anything worse than sitting in a room with a lot of women moaning that they’re past it and nobody will employ them. Do you want coffee? How many calories in a flat white, do you reckon?’
(Hang on, I read that the other day. Paging Roy. 1‘Roy, can you please get me the number of calories in a flat white? Full fat and semi-skimmed. Roy, hello? You’re not allowed a lunch break by the way. Being my memory valet is a full-time job.’)
Last time I spoke to Richard about finding a position at a good firm in London, he said, ‘It’ll kill you doing that journey twice a day. You’re not as young as you were. Why don’t you find something local like Debra did?’
Is that really what he wants for me? Deb quit her job at one of the top London law firms a couple of years after Jim shacked up with the Asian Babe (who is friendly, tactful, sweet with the kids and super-bright – basically your total nightmare). Felix had become obsessive about not having peas too close to the sweetcorn or ketchup on his plate, and he bit any nanny who forgot this diktat. Finding a form of childcare that was happy to be bitten on a regular basis proved impossible. ‘I did not give up, Kate, I bloody well surrendered to the inevitable,’ Debra booms when she’s had too many, which is quite often lately. In midlife, all the women I know, apart from the ‘My Body is a Temple’ high priestesses, are intimates of Count Chardonnay and his cheeky sidekick Pinot Grigio. Every day, around 6.35 pm, when habit sends me to get wine out of the fridge, I think ‘Empty calories!’ and sometimes I am good and listen to that health warning, but other times it’s easier, and kinder somehow, to grant myself admission to the buzzy warmth and instant sense of
