old friends

Six months ago, an old friend from London messaged me to say that she’d be in Tassie with her husband in January, and might we catch up? Sarah and Tom were planning to visit their son on his gap year in Melbourne, with a week’s holiday in Tassie. At the time, still deep in winter, the prospect of seeing English friends in Hobart in January seemed as remote to me as, well, summer. So of course I said yes.

When I first left London for Melbourne, I promised friends in the UK that I’d visit them every other year. But as it turned out, there was no magic carpet and that didn’t happen. Since I left London in 2001, I’ve visited just twice, once when my kids were in primary school and again when they were teenagers. I underestimated so much, when we first left London, not least the upheaval and cost of extended travel. Then again, how could I have left old friends otherwise?

On Monday, another two old friends, these ones from Melbourne, came for lunch on their way to the airport after a week on the east coast. What is it, I wondered, as I sat across from them at my kitchen table, about the power of old friends? As they looked at me, beetroot soup and bread between us, I felt as if they knew me inside out. Even though, realistically, I knew there was much that they couldn’t possibly know about in the intervening years.

Perhaps, I mused after, the power of old friends came from the fact that they got to know me before anything irreversible happened to me - namely my children growing up, deaths in my family and my marriage coming to an end. It seemed to come from these friends having known me when everything had felt possible, when all that I had to do was to live up to my promise, my what ifs. As I ladled scarlet soup into bowls, and my friends casually described where they were in their careers, I felt compelled to ask myself where I was in mine.

‘And how much time do you spend gardening?’ Cassy asked me, as we walked back up the garden after lunch.

‘Oh’, I said, ‘about two mornings a week’. While my answer wasn’t a complete fib, it was definitely a fiction. Because it’s rare for me to spend a whole morning in the garden. Whenever I’m not teaching, and have any say in how I spend my morning, I put my writing first. However, in answer to Cassie’s question, I plumped for an easy answer, rather than the clumsy truth which is that I’ve never thought to count the hours I spend in the garden.

The thing about old friends is that they’re too polite to ask the real questions that I imagine, in apprehension of their visit, might be on their minds. They don’t ask straight out, ‘How are you doing without James around?’ Or, ‘Are you okay financially?’ Or, ‘Have you met anyone else?’ (Answers: Fine. Okay. No.) In the absence of these questions, they ask social ones, in response to which I end up giving away more of myself than my friends do of themselves, leaving me feeling undressed and squirming on my chair. This, of course, is the last thing old friends want me to feel. What kind of friends would want that? They want me to feel relaxed and accepted, just as I am. They’ve looked me up to reassure me that they still care about me, are still interested in me, and not to report back to anyone about how I’m doing.

Yesterday, as I stood in the kitchen cooking Bolognese sauce for dinner on Friday, a piece of music crept on to my playlist that made me cry. My first thought, after my tears, was, ‘I can’t remember when I last cried’. But I also knew that I’d been bottling up my feelings since Monday and that they needed to come out. Out they tumbled, the memories and if only’s, along with the sympathy that I both longed for and kept at arm’s length for fear of losing the strength that I need to hold my life together.

As I cried, I stopped holding everything together. I started joining the dots backwards in that way that is impossible to do when you try to connect them going forwards. In my panic, I soon arrived at the conclusion that I should have seen the end of my marriage coming. Wiping away my years with James, I dissolved them just like that, by the fact of his leaving. Stirring Bolognese sauce at the hob, adding garlic and crushing tinned tomatoes with my hands, like Jamie Oliver, I knew that this was the nub of my struggle.

If James were still around to hear me ruminating like this, he’d tell me not to be ridiculous. He’d say that Tom and Sarah had way too much on their minds to have time to form an opinion on me. And he’d be right. The challenge for me, these days, is to pull myself together all by myself. It’s to tell myself that I’m being ridiculous when I know, in my heart, I am. And to do this without the protective solace of being in a couple that, in my experience, made it easier not to care about what I thought other people thought of me.

I feel no desire to be in another relationship. I like being on my own much more than I thought I would. (Annoyingly, James was right about this.) Maybe I’m still in the relief stage. Then again, I might not be. This may change when my kids leave home permanently, but right now I savour the time I spend alone at home.

When I cried yesterday - for which I can’t blame the onions as I was past that stage - I didn’t cry for long. But it was long enough to uncover the roots of my upset. What upset me most was the idea that, in the eyes of these old friends, I’d made some big mistakes. Just having them in my kitchen sent me free-falling, back to my life in London. In my free-fall, I imagined that, this time around, I’d make better, more sensible choices. So that now, twenty-five years on, I could look around and find myself buttressed by a good marriage, a decent career and a stable financial future.

When the music that made me cry had ended, I drank a glass of water and stopped feeling sorry for myself. I looked around the kitchen and out to the garden, and realised that I didn’t really regret my life choices. Over time, I’d managed to be true to my longings. Nor had I compromised my values. Instead, in my fear that friends might look on me and feel sorry for me, even pity me, I’d flattened out and made one-dimensional what has been and still is a rich and fortunate life.

I also realised that, if I could go back to the day that I married James in a gold dress in a London church, and been told by a soothsayer that our marriage would come to an end in twenty-five years’ time, after many good years together, that I’d still have said ‘I do’ before the assembled congregation.

Just then, my daughter entered the kitchen to find me in the process of pulling myself together. After telling her a potted version of my upset, she pointed out, not unsympathetically but matter-of-factly, that she wouldn’t exist if James and I hadn’t made the choices that we had all those years ago.