MY LOVE AGONY
David Lovibond spends £35 a month
on a hairdresser: it's the price of a midlife urge to find true romance
THERE is a recently deceased character in A14, McBeal who, in a crisis of early middle age, leaves his square-jawed wife, affects egregiously misogynist views, and enters courtrooms closely escorted by a guard of beautiful, hydraulically powered 'Billy-Girls'.
I know how he wanted to feel. During my forties I became inured to increasing invisibility: attractive women (well, all women really) would slide their eyes past me unseeing — supermarket check-out girls, hotel receptionists, bank clerks, even the funnylooking girl in the service station who frankly had no reason to be snippy, stopped smiling and, if they said anything at all, spoke to a space above my thinning hair. As I stood in profile before my bathroom mirror (not an especially narrow mirror), I found I had to lean backwards to get a glimpse of my stomach, and when I walked I could actually feel my face wobbling.
But the final straw, as I contemplated my approaching 50th birthday, was a family visit to Salisbury Cathedral. An obviously myopic female guide asked my six-year-old daughter if her grandfather had shown her the wild animals hidden in the stained glass. I was 49 and thought I could never be old, and now, on the eve of 2001, an elderly churchwarden had recognised a fellow member of that vast, insensate legion for whom opportunity was over. I was filled with unbearable regret for all the long, safe years when I'd imagined there would always be time. I had to steal back a last chance of change and youthfulness.
In banal conformity to the cliché, I have joined a gym, and several times a week in extremis on the treadmill my body sends out a frantically coded SOS, my mouth a dot of hurried exhalation and then a long-lipped rictus dash of inhalation. I swallow vitamins and eat only pasta; I count calories and pepper my talk with accounts of sets and reps, leg-presses and chin-lifts. I spend £35 a month with hairdresser Chris, and soon my bang (as Alan Clark was wont to call it) will take on an entirely natural conker colour.
I thought how brave and honourable it would be to abandon the glamour of freelance journalism and become a teacher. I visited a school in Dorset where the head of the history department described himself as a 'service provider' who handed out detailed notes at the end of his lessons `to save the guys from the hassle of writing anything down'. There was a lot of guff about 'respect' and 'valuing the opinions of others'; no one mentioned teaching, nor did I.
But mainly my little revolution was about sex, of course. I wanted to bale out of a tenyear relationship that had turned sour long before, and search out old girlfriends I had loved and lost 30 years ago, in the fantastical hope that they could somehow restore our time of optimism and innocence before all the mistakes were made. Like some ersatz Dr Zhivago I made a January pilgrimage through the snows of suburban Hertfordshire and engineered a wordless and completely pointless encounter with 'she who will never be forgotten'. I visited the Lakes for the first time since 1966 and walked the fells where my first romance played out its tiny dramas. I had hoped for some sort of revelation, or at least the chance to wallow in the poignancy of loss. I have to report, though, that it was the unremembered oddness of the place rather than sentimental reveries which made an impact: Scafell Pike and Helvellyn seem to have been fitted with stairs, and the hills are awash with Christian Socialists saying hello to each other or eating packed lunches.
My dalliance with the past did have the benefit of finally putting paid to the unwanted relationship, but had not exactly enlivened my present. So I decided to advertise. I placed a couple of notices in the Times's lonely-hearts section, wittily describing my attributes and modestly suggesting that those of any respondents should include fortyishness, slimness and braininess. I received dozens of telephone messages and letters from women in their mid-fifties, women who included little drawings of flowers and fairy folk in their notes, women who lived in Cornwall or North Wales, women who were either drunk or mentally unstable, women in despair who wanted rescuing, and women who had no business reading the Times in the first place.
There is an unspoken modus operandi which governs these encounters. On the telephone we competed as to who could give the least information and remain polite: no addresses, no landline numbers used (or numbers withheld), first names only, no occupational details and the vaguest account of family circumstances. Having no idea what these women really looked like (I could hardly ask them if they weren't in fact ugly), I eventually met six or seven of the 'candidates' during the spring. How some of them could in conscience have felt that they met the criterion of slimness eludes me, and none of them did more than resemble the descriptions they had given. There was the local government officer who wrote to assure me of her attractiveness, but who turned out to have no neck and a hearing-aid. What was worse, this veritable pitprop had viscerally left-wing opinions which her disability obliged her to shout at me in public places. Then there was the office manager with a fondness for red wine who blew spit bubbles as she propositioned me; and the rather elderly nurse who luxuriated in the details of her hysterectomy and complained at my lack of conversation.
The talk was typically difficult. I had a prepared list of topics — job, family, history, hobbies, the absurdity of the situation — and hoped a momentum would develop before I'd exhausted the agenda. But sometimes it didn't, and I have rarely experienced panic to compare.
There was, though, one tentative supplicant as awkward as I was. And I confess it was an exquisite pain to wait like a lovestruck teenager for the expected call or billet-doux, and a very peculiar pleasure to learn the techno-art of text-messaging, the better to exchange cryptic lewdnesses.
No less accountable to reason are my frenetic attempts to reassemble my collection of mint condition 'William' and 'Jennings' books, which my mother gave away to a jumble sale during my first term at university. Then there are the 500-mile round trips in fruitless search for family graves in Liverpool and Anglesey . but that's another story.
Previous page
