‘Oh good Lord,’ Anna said, ‘and I bet you made such a lovely cuddly grandma. And you’re looking great, so well.’
I laughed uneasily, not sure how to take this, as there was something in Anna’s tone I remembered from all those years ago but couldn’t quite pin down. I knew I’d put on a bit of weight since our last meeting and I was a bit self-conscious about it, particularly as Anna was still reed slim.
‘Am I? Look, I have pictures on my phone of Ben, and this is my new house. It’s a bit of a blank canvas at the moment, terribly dull. I’m not sure what to do with it.’
We spent the next half hour swiping through our phones and comparing children, holiday snaps and house remodelling, and meanwhile the waitress patiently brought us pots of tea and two cake stands filled with lovely looking treats.
I began to relax. It was going to be fine after all. I took a tiny prawn sandwich; it was delicious.
We were there for nearly three hours, drinking tea, swapping stories of the last decades and somehow shedding the weight of our years at the same time.
All three of us had changed of course. My hair was pepper and salt and I was wearing smart shoes for the first time for ages in honour of the occasion. Harriet had grey spiky hair and was wearing glasses all the time, not just for reading. She was about to have a knee operation; she had problems with her balance. Anna’s hair, once lustrous and blond and impossibly curly, was silver and tamed. She and Rupert had just returned from a holiday staying with friends who owned a finca in Spain. They always had done more interesting things than we had; I suppose they had friends with more money.
It was very strange. Looking at them, it was as though the girls I had known were still in there somewhere but hiding under the camouflage of older faces, the experiences of age and the years that had passed.
But I for one could remember at last what it felt like to be young again, to laugh and not worry about what other people might think. I’d had years of living with a disapproving father and then a narcissistic husband, both men who hated anyone to be enjoying themselves more than they were, not to be the centre of attention.
That afternoon it seemed that husbands, ex-husbands, children and grandchildren, domestic worries and health concerns, none of it mattered. We were simply three friends enjoying each other’s company again, in our own time. We could still remember the core of our friendship. It was marvellous.
Gradually as the minutes passed, the unfamiliarity of wrinkles and new hair styles and sensible clothes faded, and I could begin to see the girls we had once been.
Eventually it was time to think about leaving, for the three of us to go our separate ways again, but this time it was different. We were going to meet up again the following month, and the month after that. Friends for so many years, we really were friends reunited. But in a good way.
3
Everything really stepped up a gear about six months later.
Despite our best intentions, we hadn’t been able to meet up as often as we had planned for a while because of family issues. Of course, life had changed for us all in so many ways. Other people still had calls on our time.
Anna’s sons and their families had both been moving house, one to Scotland and the other to Cornwall, and Anna and Rupert seemed to have been constantly whizzing up and down various motorways with laden cars to help out or give their opinions of properties.
Harriet had recently retired from academia, and her twin daughters had finished their degrees and gone off travelling for a year in a flurry of passports and backpacks and unrealistic promises to keep in touch on a daily basis.
My son had finalised his breakup and come back to live at home with me ‘for a few weeks’, a nebulous time which by then had extended into five months. My garage was full of his belongings; the fridge was nearly always empty. I suppose if I was honest I didn’t mind that much. He was company of sorts.
Despite his erratic working hours and newly blossoming social life, he was good fun, if a bit high maintenance. Everything had to be planet friendly and carbon neutral. We had enjoyed some spirited discussions about vegetables, paper towels and shampoo, which of course was fine, but his principles didn’t seem to cover his gas-guzzling car or his many recent mini breaks with his friends to places like Morocco and Turkey.
The three of us were enjoying a little mini break of our own one day, together in glorious, May sunshine, almost a heatwave actually, and having by then thoroughly caught up with the details of each other’s past lives, we were starting to contemplate the future. And considering I had felt as though life since my divorce had been almost stagnant, this made a lovely change. In fact, the more I faced reality of life as a divorcee and the possibilities, the more I could start to hope that life still had something to offer me. In a strange way reuniting with Anna and Harriet had helped with this and made me remember the person I had once been, back then when the whole of my adult life was ahead of me.
‘Don’t you think it’s time we did something different?’ Anna said that afternoon as we shared a bottle of Pinot Grigio on the terrace of Sea Spray, the adorable holiday cottage in Devon Anna and Rupert had bought for family gatherings many years previously.
Harriet, who had been lying back on her sunbed with a towel over her legs because she was self-conscious about a scar from her recent knee operation, opened one eye and looked suspicious.
‘I can almost smell the trouble from here.’
Anna laughed. ‘We need to think of the future.’
‘How odd, that’s exactly what I was thinking,’ I said.
‘We’ve all retired now,’ Anna said, ‘all those years of slog and being good, chasing after our kids and utter tedium. Don’t you think we deserve a proper treat? Not just a few days in Devon, but an actual full-blown escapade.’
We considered this for a few moments.
‘Escapade; something involving adventure, daring or excitement,’ Harriet murmured. ‘I’m not terribly sure about that.’
‘Are we still allowed to have adventures? I haven’t been on a proper break on my own for years. I mean one without the kids or Feckless Freddy,’ I said.
This was my polite nickname for Frederick, who had been my husband for nearly thirty years. I had called him far worse.
