Jane Asher - Losing It

She had that sweet, patient smile on her face again, and the weird thing was that it made her look as if she understood far more about all this stuff than I did, while at the same time I knew perfectly well that she hadn’t got a clue what I was on about. Holly always does that to me – whatever I’m trying to tell her she always seems to be one jump ahead, even though she doesn’t really know a thing about quantum mechanics.

She put one elbow on the table and rested her chin on her hand. ‘I don’t see that at all,’ she said, still smiling and pretending to be interested. ‘Of course your life isn’t pointless, Ben. Try and explain.’

‘I’m trying to tell you something really important here, and you’ve got that “let’s humour Ben” look on your face. Forget it, Hol.’

‘No, go on. Don’t be so touchy. I will try to understand, I promise.’

‘It’s really simple – but it frightens me. I just feel sometimes that everything round me is unreal because I can’t look at it without changing it. I suppose that’s what I’m trying to say.’

‘How’s your dad, by the way?’

‘My dad?’

‘Yes. You haven’t talked about him much, lately. You used to all the time. I just wondered if he was OK?’

It really made me think, when she said that. It was true – I did used to tell her about Dad’s cases and things. They were always pretty interesting when he was dealing with divorces and stuff: he was cool about telling me some of the really strange things people get up to and how he had to question them about all the intimate bedroom things that went on. But he hadn’t been telling me much recently, and I hadn’t realised until Holly asked.

‘I think he’s OK,’ I said, ‘but he is a bit quiet, now you mention it. Just working hard, I suppose.’

Charlie’s been a bit strange lately. All this volunteering to do the shopping is most out of character: I know he says he’s interested in the fat checkout girl and seeing if he can cheer her up, but I find it very hard to believe that’s really what he’s up to. It must be six or seven times he’s gone back there now, over the last couple of weeks. Maybe he feels guilty about me: I know I’ve been working too hard and it worries him. Rather sweet really, the way he’s trying to take the pressure off me. But I do wish he’d go back to Sainsbury’s or Waitrose, even if it would spoil his experiment with the girl. I think we’re all getting rather tired of the small selection he finds at SavaMart. I’ll have to put my foot down and insist I do the shopping again for a while.

Meanwhile, I think it’s time I did something about the way I look: I caught sight of myself in a mirror on the wall of the gym at the school I’m inspecting and I was quite shocked. I thought I knew exactly how I looked – after all, I stare into that mirror in the bathroom every morning and evening. But there was something about the way I was standing or – I don’t know; I looked more like sixty than forty-eight. And yet, when I’m at the school, I feel far more in tune with the children than I do with the staff, almost as if I’m pretending to be grown-up when I’m discussing things with the head. She’s probably feeling exactly the same. I know when I was teaching I felt utterly different from the way I used to think teachers felt when I was a girl; they looked so secure and smug and certain about everything they said or did. How I longed to be like them. They didn’t look as if they could ever feel frightened of going to the dentist, or being late with giving work in or wearing the wrong thing. All the things I was so scared of. I could see it would all be fine once I was past the age of twenty or so.

Now I know you feel exactly the same, of course, but you pretend that you don’t. So why should I go round looking like a mature woman of sixty-something when I feel the same as I did at fourteen? There has to be a happy compromise, surely. I know I can’t go round in a short, tight skirt and strappy top like Sally does, for heaven’s sake, but there has to be something in between that and these sensible suits I seem to have crept into wearing. And there must be a way of doing my hair and make-up that’s a bit more – well, a bit prettier. My figure’s not too bad, and although my hair’s thinner than it was, it’s still –

Oh, for God’s sake – listen to me! I sound like something off the pages of a women’s magazine. Is this it? Am I going through a mid-life crisis, just when I thought I was skimming over the surface of the menopause so successfully? A confident, modern, professional woman, that’s what I am – how bizarre to find myself worrying about all this stuff, like a teenager. I haven’t got time for all this.

I wish I hadn’t gone off sex. Not just for all the obvious reasons – that I enjoyed it and it kept Charlie and me close and made me feel wanted and all that – but also because it spoils so many other things. I was Christmas shopping today, for example, in Oxford Street, and it struck me how many aspects of life are geared to the business of physical attraction. When I buy clothes and the odd bit of make-up now it’s just like stocking up on anything else, and I know it’s since sex has gone out of it that it’s stopped being fun. Well, it was – terrific fun, to sit in front of the mirror and dress and paint my body to make it attractive. Now I dress simply to look neat and tidy for its own sake, not to be actively attractive to the opposite sex. Clothes, make-up, shoes, hair and all the other nonsense become far less interesting when they don’t give you that little frisson of feeling potentially desirable – it may be unfashionable to admit to thinking that, but I do.

Charlie has never minded that I’m less proactive in our love-making – it’s not as if I can’t get any pleasure out of it. I can – it’s just that if I were honest I’d probably rather be reading a good book. I miss so much that wonderfully desperate need that I had in my youth: it was so energising and animal to be dominated by my physical urges. Probably the only time in my life I’ve really enjoyed being out of control.

I remember how Charlie used to stay at my parents’ house when we were going out together. We lived in one of those tall Victorian houses in Highgate, and he’d just got himself attached to chambers as a junior of some sort. He had rooms, of course, but half the time he’d come and live with us. For my mother’s food, he used to say, and she’d beam with pride and my father would shake his head in mock despair and mutter about being eaten out of house and home. They loved it really, not having had a boy of their own, and it suited Charlie and me very well to have him treated as a surrogate son. Made him my surrogate brother, I suppose, but – my God, he certainly didn’t treat me as any self-respecting brother would. It wasn’t the food he was hungry for in those days – and he wasn’t the only one who was starving either.

We had a very simple system. His bedroom was on the top floor, in what would have been the servants’ rooms when the house was first built, I suppose, and my room was on the floor below, just above where my parents slept. There was no bathroom at the very top and Charlie used to have to come down to use the one next to my bedroom. It would have been far too risky to creep into my room, so he used to leave a little note or drawing in the bathroom when he felt like a bit of hanky-panky, as my father would have put it. The notes were never rude, naturally: in fact they were devised to be as innocuous as possible and if discovered would simply have looked like scraps of paper dropped accidentally and inscribed with odd jottings about law books or train times. But when I went to brush my teeth the sight of one of those bits of paper would set me on fire and I’d be up those stairs in a flash – or, at least, in as near to a flash as I could manage while avoiding the creakier stair treads. It wasn’t only one way, either – there were many times I’d make sure I got to the bathroom first, and left notes of my own, signalling my impending visits.