freely together as if they’d known each other all their lives.
But best of all, Marjorie noticed, it had established the buzz of a sudden sense of, yes, pride in the room. Were the grey heads really starting to sit up and feel counted?
Marjorie liked that feeling, herself, too. So, yes, she might come back next week. She hadn’t intended to at the outset; she’d just been doing it to appease Gracie. But now she might ask Lou if she wanted to come. Perhaps Gracie would even pick Lou up and drive them both here. Lou would love it here as she always had plenty to say about everything. Marjorie smiled at that thought.
Oh well, it took all sorts to make a good pie!
The idea of afternoon tea with a group of total strangers had not, initially, sat well with Marjorie Sykes.
‘When you reach a certain age,’ she’d told her daughter, Gracie, ‘you only really want close friends and family around you.’
But following her discussion with Gracie, when the flyer about afternoon tea at the community centre had landed on their doormat, and the subsequent afternoon tea meeting, she was now – surprisingly – warming to the idea.
She’d shared Gracie’s flat with her for the last four years, and that had been lovely, of course, but forays out with her daughter or anyone else for that matter were sporadic. Her remaining friends were thin on the ground for one reason or another – mainly due to Oliver – or now lived elsewhere and Gracie was often shattered when she came back from work at night, after her train then bus journey from the out-of-town secondary school where she taught English. So Marjorie had very little interaction with anyone on a regular basis, apart from the man in the corner shop or the postman or occasional visits to see her doctor.
Her only child, Gracie, slim with a blonde bob, was the apple of her eye. She’d recently won an award from her pupils where she taught, who were encouraged to vote for the best teacher in their school each year. ‘It’s a new in-house award, following that incident last year when that boy attacked one of the tutors,’ Gracie had explained to her mother. ‘It’s the Head’s latest idea to help improve relationships between the staff and students. The children vote on three categories: respect, approachability and clarity of instruction. It’s supposed to make the kids think about the role of a school tutor in their lives; and for us, it highlights any grey areas where we should be making improvements.’ Gracie possessed a certain calm and poise and knew how to mete out the right degree of encouragement to her students, concentrating on their positive attributes rather than the negative, in order to encourage rather than discourage. Her approach had clearly earned the children’s hearts.
Yet, her daughter’s marvellous achievements aside, Marjorie was miffed to note that Gracie was being decidedly pushy, these days, about her mother needing to do something meaningful with her life instead of ‘moping around all day’.
Admittedly, helping Gracie with the shopping, cleaning and washing took care of morning duties, but – apart from daytime TV – what was there to actually do during the long tedious hours until bedtime? She daren’t admit to her daughter that most afternoons she simply sat on the sofa ploughing her way through books she’d acquired from the library because there really wasn’t much else to occupy her time.
‘Why don’t you go do some voluntary work, Mum? Or help an elderly person with their cleaning or something?’ Gracie encouraged, when her mother had moaned about the lack of activities during the afternoon.
But she was eighty-two, for God’s sake! Not some idle teenager being encouraged that there was more to life than being ‘poked’ or snap-chatted by all her friends or whatever the latest devices-related craze was. Didn’t the years of bringing up a family entitle her to a bit of peace, now she was old, craggy and tired? In the mirror, a grey-haired lady with a plethora of facial lines, born from far too much angst, stared back at her. Even with make-up, she looked tired.
That said, no one had told Marjorie about the inevitable boring bits she’d duly experience as she got older – especially the hardly-anything-to-do-all-day bit. And she didn’t want to admit that sometimes she felt like screaming, trying to think up new things to do every single day. That was tiring enough in itself! Yet she realised having nothing meaningful to do on a daily basis had made her withdraw from life. Sometimes she paced the flat; sometimes she could only bring herself to stare out the window, arms folded, at the communal patio, watching the birds pecking at seed on the bird table she’d bought and set up, mainly to give herself something to look at when she had nothing better to do. Oh, she’d been thrilled when the other residents had congratulated her for that. But even though she was thoroughly fed up with things at the moment she certainly knew she didn’t need another ‘Life Goal’ at her age.
‘Besides, I still have a few friends, as you well know, daughter dear.’
However, it did irk Marjorie that the few friends she had left were all occupied by grandchildren or great-grandchildren and didn’t see her very often. And being as Gracie was divorced with no little ones to occupy Marjorie’s time, she couldn’t even fulfil her own longed-for role as a grandmother. Marjorie often remarked that it was ‘High time you got married again, Gracie dear, and gave me grandchildren! You’re in your late forties now, sweetheart. No time to waste!’
And then their conversations would turn into a testy argument, with Marjorie wagging an index finger and Gracie insisting that since the collapse of her marriage – not due to them being childless, but because Harry had gone off with some ‘young thing’, as Marjorie put it – she’d wanted nothing more to do with men.
‘I’m loving all this free time by myself, Mother. I can do what I want, when I want, which is great. Thought you – of all people – would understand that? I tried pandering to Harry’s every need and where did that get me, huh? Still went off with someone else! What is it with you and I, picking the wrong men all the time?’
Marjorie had sighed.
So, no grandchildren for her, then. No rocking babies gently to sleep. No fun days out with tantrums in the park about whose turn it was on the swings. Nope! A life of solitary confinement, occasionally seeing friends whose lives weren’t embossed with the embroilment of family life, was her luck of the draw.
Thus Marjorie’s life, when she wasn’t moping around the house, consisted of occasional visits to the library to borrow and return books, just to give her a reason to get out of the house; or occasional walks in the park with Gracie, providing her daughter was free on a weekend; or taking her oldest and best friend Lou to the chiropodist, to get her toenails cut; but no excursions to get a nice cup of tea somewhere afterwards. So it was far from an exciting existence and, yes, she conceded privately, Gracie was right; it was aimless at best, pointless at worst.
Living with her daughter hadn’t turned out to be full of the promise she’d expected. But, tedium aside, Marjorie knew it was infinitely better than living by herself after Oliver died.
And thank the Lord he had!
Just as well he’d had his stroke because Marjorie couldn’t think of any new ideas about how she could possibly get rid of him, without getting the blame!
Yes, that sounded bad. But Marjorie’s husband Oliver had been a bully, both emotionally and physically, for most of their married life. Marjorie couldn’t remember when it had first started. Possibly it had begun when he’d left the army ‘under a cloud’.
