- Jul 16, 2003
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Life Eternal
“Don’t be so silly,” she said throwing herself onto the bed. “I don’t care, so why should anyone else?”
She was right, of course. Sophie was ten years my junior, and sometimes it bothered me. Just between ourselves, the age difference didn’t matter, but other people sometimes said things. Light-hearted, mostly - I had mercilessly ribbed my cousin David about his wife, whom he had met when she was sixteen and he was twenty-two, and he was enjoying his revenge on me now.
And what of me? I am thirty-five, and a confirmed bachelor, although Sophie made me start to question my commitment to this particular creed. I am a lecturer at one of those small provincial colleges of further education that tries desperately to look like a red-brick University by offering a couple of degrees in subjects like advertising and marketing. I am something of an idealist - I had always fancied myself as a don at Oxford or Cambridge, but in the battle between ambition and reality, reality had been holding the best hand from the start. My own background is in Economics, and perhaps it was the endless jokes about LSE degrees that had fired my ambition. Firing my cynicism instead now is the feeling that a degree in advertising was even more pointless. Advertising?? Are we really going to admit people to the degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honours in Making People Buy Things They Don’t Want With Money They Don’t Have? There, it’s out now and you know the sort of person I am; and yes, I have a cat, not a dog, and I am a member of Greenpeace and CAMRA. You can probably also guess that I lean towards Keynesian economics and voted Labour when it was a left wing party. I have long hair which I tie back - my receding hair line makes me look like Francis Rossi, and Sophie said that if I ever tried to hide my bald patch by combing my hair over it she’d leave me that day.
I first met Sophie when I was initiating a group of new students in the secret rites and mysteries of the college library. The library is presided over by Maureen O’Connor, a woman of indeterminable age. In the seven years I have been at the college she has never got any older, and I suspect that she must have a portrait in the attic that ages instead. Sophie had started work there at the beginning of that term.
Sophie was a victim of the success of our education system. She had a degree in marine biology, but competing with a couple of thousand out-of-work academics for every job left her on the dole queue until she took the two-GCSEs-and-a-modicum-of-common-sense Assistant Librarian post at the college.
I gleaned this much the first time we really got talking. I used to escape the college to the Bricklayer’s Arms, a pub too cheap for our image-conscious students and too grotty for the rest of the staff. They do a fine drop of Pedigree, however, and the place isn’t full of lager-swilling trendies threatening what they intend to do to some guy over some girl, so it suits me fine. Given its ‘off the normal round’ status, it generally has a fairly steady clientele of regulars, so it was a surprise to find Sophie sat there with a pint, apparently on her own.
Now, I’ve mentioned that I am a bachelor, and by choice. This is not through any lack of interest in women, but simply through a lack of love of the idea of being responsible for someone else. I have friends who are married - most of them, in fact - and it seems that they are always thinking they’ve got to be getting on now or Julie will be worrying, or no they can’t come to the pub tonight they’re entertaining the in-laws, or whatever. I’m an independent spirit and enjoy my small flat with just the cat to be responsible for, and he doesn’t worry unless the next morning comes and there’s no blob on legs to open the tin.
But that day, I spoke to Sophie out of pure friendliness. I was also motivated my being a little bored, and wondering what she was doing there on her own.
I issued the usual social pleasantries - the ‘mind if I join you?’s and the like and then asked her if she was waiting for someone.
“I was,” she said, “but it doesn’t look like she’s showing up.”
The optimistic part of my brain perked up at the word ‘she’. I had been fearing deep down that she was waiting for her boyfriend. Pretty women in pubs on their own usually are.
I often wonder if other men do the same sort of conscious ‘check-list’ ticking when getting to know potential partners. Whenever I’ve mentioned it to female friends they’ve always been horrified, as much at the concept of someone I hardly know being a ‘potential partner’ as the check-list idea itself. But my male friends have always smiled knowingly when I refer to it, so perhaps it is a man thing. Certainly Sophie had already scored a distinction by drinking draught Theakston’s in pints, and a merit by simply not wearing white stilettos with no tights. Somehow I couldn’t see her drinking Margaritas at the local night club while dancing round her handbag.
From there, things just developed. More and more Sophie scored highly on my mental checklist - I remember a strong feeling of empathy when she strode over to the jukebox in the Red Lion and put on virtually the entire catalogue of Thin Lizzy and Deep Purple. We became lovers with a sense of inevitability - it would have been a pointless waste of energy to try to avoid it.
Of course, when she moved in with me my friends all wagged their fingers and smiled their ‘I told you so’ smiles. But Sophie was different. Their partners sometimes came across as responsibilities, impositions, ties even. Yes, Sophie was different - perhaps I began to understand for the first time what love was. Looking back now, I recall those days as almost perfect - days filled with a purpose and reality that I hadn’t known before. They went fast, and I cannot recall any sorrow in those weeks, and as they grew into months, still the enchantment lasted. I even became a bit less cynical. A world that had Sophie in it couldn’t be quite as bad as I had begun to think.
All that concerned me was the age difference between us. Although mathematically the gap between us would become less and less significant as we grew older, and on one level I felt that if it didn't matter now it would matter even less in the future, I couldn’t help feel that as she neared the still young thirty, I would be pushing the more austere forty. Forty! It seemed so old to me, even though it was only five years away. Up to now, I still knew people older than me who still looked, well, young, but I knew no-one of forty-something who didn’t look, frankly, middle-aged. It was the age that wrinkles started to come, the age that women started to cut their hair short and have unattractive perms. Most people had teenage children by then, and if nothing else turned you into a boring conventional middle-ager, that seemed to. I could carry on being the same - I’d felt like I was nineteen since I really was - but forty I’d be. I suppose people in their sixties would envy me, but I felt the oncoming Four-Oh like the footsteps of the Grim Reaper himself. That thief in the night had had my hair, and one day he’d have me too. Forty felt like his equivalent of the letter that your Building Society sends you fifteen years into your mortgage reminding you that in ten years repayment will be due.
Sophie couldn’t see the problem. True, of itself it didn’t matter to us, so why should we be bothered. She didn’t quite understand that I saw myself as a nearly middle-aged man, and she was a young woman. And she was beautiful. Perhaps I haven’t mentioned that yet. It was both important and yet of no matter. She used to insist that I was biased, and I explained that that was true, and I was always biased towards beautiful women. This usually made her throw cushions at me, giving me an excuse to throw them back. It was these play fights that I perhaps enjoyed most - it had always somehow epitomised the easy joy between us. I remembered what C S Lewis’ Devil Screwtape had said of joy: “amongst adults, some pretext in the way of Jokes is usually provided, but the facility with which the smallest witticisms produce laughter at such a time shows that they are not the real cause. What the real cause is we do not know.” But we knew, or at least we understood, and knowing that we thought we could laugh hell in the face.
The Lord Giveth...
The pregnancy was not planned, but when Sophie told me I was instantly delighted. My single lifestyle had had the unfillable disadvantage that I had no child, and perhaps many women don’t understand that the yearning for fatherhood in men can be as strong as that for motherhood in women. As strong, but different. The women I knew seemed to crave a baby and its dependence on them; as a man (or just as me? I don't know) I craved a child as a partial answer to the problem of my own mortality. If I could not live for ever, I could ensure that I could live on in my child. And the oncoming forties which seemed so chilling perhaps heightened my desire to be a father.
Whatever, I leapt into the new role with energy, and perhaps a little silliness. Hardly a shopping trip passed without me bringing home some pointless and unnecessary piece of gubbins which packaging in soft tones of pastel blue and pale pink announced was an essential for a happier, healthier baby. Perhaps it was no more than an opportunity to announce to the world that I was going to be a father. As a professional, I would like to try to pretend I was above such things, but the simple reality was that I was as proud as Punch and wanted to stand at the top of the High Street and shout it to the world.
And so the days passed. Eventually, of course, Sophie had to stop work. We’d discussed this, of course, and Sophie had decided that she would not go back until the child was at school. At first, I was actually horrified at this. “You don’t have to be chained to the kitchen sink to be a mother, you know!” I said to her, repeating the feminist mantra which I had assumed was an article of faith to all women under forty.
© Karl Thornley 1999
“Don’t be so silly,” she said throwing herself onto the bed. “I don’t care, so why should anyone else?”
She was right, of course. Sophie was ten years my junior, and sometimes it bothered me. Just between ourselves, the age difference didn’t matter, but other people sometimes said things. Light-hearted, mostly - I had mercilessly ribbed my cousin David about his wife, whom he had met when she was sixteen and he was twenty-two, and he was enjoying his revenge on me now.
And what of me? I am thirty-five, and a confirmed bachelor, although Sophie made me start to question my commitment to this particular creed. I am a lecturer at one of those small provincial colleges of further education that tries desperately to look like a red-brick University by offering a couple of degrees in subjects like advertising and marketing. I am something of an idealist - I had always fancied myself as a don at Oxford or Cambridge, but in the battle between ambition and reality, reality had been holding the best hand from the start. My own background is in Economics, and perhaps it was the endless jokes about LSE degrees that had fired my ambition. Firing my cynicism instead now is the feeling that a degree in advertising was even more pointless. Advertising?? Are we really going to admit people to the degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honours in Making People Buy Things They Don’t Want With Money They Don’t Have? There, it’s out now and you know the sort of person I am; and yes, I have a cat, not a dog, and I am a member of Greenpeace and CAMRA. You can probably also guess that I lean towards Keynesian economics and voted Labour when it was a left wing party. I have long hair which I tie back - my receding hair line makes me look like Francis Rossi, and Sophie said that if I ever tried to hide my bald patch by combing my hair over it she’d leave me that day.
I first met Sophie when I was initiating a group of new students in the secret rites and mysteries of the college library. The library is presided over by Maureen O’Connor, a woman of indeterminable age. In the seven years I have been at the college she has never got any older, and I suspect that she must have a portrait in the attic that ages instead. Sophie had started work there at the beginning of that term.
Sophie was a victim of the success of our education system. She had a degree in marine biology, but competing with a couple of thousand out-of-work academics for every job left her on the dole queue until she took the two-GCSEs-and-a-modicum-of-common-sense Assistant Librarian post at the college.
I gleaned this much the first time we really got talking. I used to escape the college to the Bricklayer’s Arms, a pub too cheap for our image-conscious students and too grotty for the rest of the staff. They do a fine drop of Pedigree, however, and the place isn’t full of lager-swilling trendies threatening what they intend to do to some guy over some girl, so it suits me fine. Given its ‘off the normal round’ status, it generally has a fairly steady clientele of regulars, so it was a surprise to find Sophie sat there with a pint, apparently on her own.
Now, I’ve mentioned that I am a bachelor, and by choice. This is not through any lack of interest in women, but simply through a lack of love of the idea of being responsible for someone else. I have friends who are married - most of them, in fact - and it seems that they are always thinking they’ve got to be getting on now or Julie will be worrying, or no they can’t come to the pub tonight they’re entertaining the in-laws, or whatever. I’m an independent spirit and enjoy my small flat with just the cat to be responsible for, and he doesn’t worry unless the next morning comes and there’s no blob on legs to open the tin.
But that day, I spoke to Sophie out of pure friendliness. I was also motivated my being a little bored, and wondering what she was doing there on her own.
I issued the usual social pleasantries - the ‘mind if I join you?’s and the like and then asked her if she was waiting for someone.
“I was,” she said, “but it doesn’t look like she’s showing up.”
The optimistic part of my brain perked up at the word ‘she’. I had been fearing deep down that she was waiting for her boyfriend. Pretty women in pubs on their own usually are.
I often wonder if other men do the same sort of conscious ‘check-list’ ticking when getting to know potential partners. Whenever I’ve mentioned it to female friends they’ve always been horrified, as much at the concept of someone I hardly know being a ‘potential partner’ as the check-list idea itself. But my male friends have always smiled knowingly when I refer to it, so perhaps it is a man thing. Certainly Sophie had already scored a distinction by drinking draught Theakston’s in pints, and a merit by simply not wearing white stilettos with no tights. Somehow I couldn’t see her drinking Margaritas at the local night club while dancing round her handbag.
From there, things just developed. More and more Sophie scored highly on my mental checklist - I remember a strong feeling of empathy when she strode over to the jukebox in the Red Lion and put on virtually the entire catalogue of Thin Lizzy and Deep Purple. We became lovers with a sense of inevitability - it would have been a pointless waste of energy to try to avoid it.
Of course, when she moved in with me my friends all wagged their fingers and smiled their ‘I told you so’ smiles. But Sophie was different. Their partners sometimes came across as responsibilities, impositions, ties even. Yes, Sophie was different - perhaps I began to understand for the first time what love was. Looking back now, I recall those days as almost perfect - days filled with a purpose and reality that I hadn’t known before. They went fast, and I cannot recall any sorrow in those weeks, and as they grew into months, still the enchantment lasted. I even became a bit less cynical. A world that had Sophie in it couldn’t be quite as bad as I had begun to think.
All that concerned me was the age difference between us. Although mathematically the gap between us would become less and less significant as we grew older, and on one level I felt that if it didn't matter now it would matter even less in the future, I couldn’t help feel that as she neared the still young thirty, I would be pushing the more austere forty. Forty! It seemed so old to me, even though it was only five years away. Up to now, I still knew people older than me who still looked, well, young, but I knew no-one of forty-something who didn’t look, frankly, middle-aged. It was the age that wrinkles started to come, the age that women started to cut their hair short and have unattractive perms. Most people had teenage children by then, and if nothing else turned you into a boring conventional middle-ager, that seemed to. I could carry on being the same - I’d felt like I was nineteen since I really was - but forty I’d be. I suppose people in their sixties would envy me, but I felt the oncoming Four-Oh like the footsteps of the Grim Reaper himself. That thief in the night had had my hair, and one day he’d have me too. Forty felt like his equivalent of the letter that your Building Society sends you fifteen years into your mortgage reminding you that in ten years repayment will be due.
Sophie couldn’t see the problem. True, of itself it didn’t matter to us, so why should we be bothered. She didn’t quite understand that I saw myself as a nearly middle-aged man, and she was a young woman. And she was beautiful. Perhaps I haven’t mentioned that yet. It was both important and yet of no matter. She used to insist that I was biased, and I explained that that was true, and I was always biased towards beautiful women. This usually made her throw cushions at me, giving me an excuse to throw them back. It was these play fights that I perhaps enjoyed most - it had always somehow epitomised the easy joy between us. I remembered what C S Lewis’ Devil Screwtape had said of joy: “amongst adults, some pretext in the way of Jokes is usually provided, but the facility with which the smallest witticisms produce laughter at such a time shows that they are not the real cause. What the real cause is we do not know.” But we knew, or at least we understood, and knowing that we thought we could laugh hell in the face.
The Lord Giveth...
The pregnancy was not planned, but when Sophie told me I was instantly delighted. My single lifestyle had had the unfillable disadvantage that I had no child, and perhaps many women don’t understand that the yearning for fatherhood in men can be as strong as that for motherhood in women. As strong, but different. The women I knew seemed to crave a baby and its dependence on them; as a man (or just as me? I don't know) I craved a child as a partial answer to the problem of my own mortality. If I could not live for ever, I could ensure that I could live on in my child. And the oncoming forties which seemed so chilling perhaps heightened my desire to be a father.
Whatever, I leapt into the new role with energy, and perhaps a little silliness. Hardly a shopping trip passed without me bringing home some pointless and unnecessary piece of gubbins which packaging in soft tones of pastel blue and pale pink announced was an essential for a happier, healthier baby. Perhaps it was no more than an opportunity to announce to the world that I was going to be a father. As a professional, I would like to try to pretend I was above such things, but the simple reality was that I was as proud as Punch and wanted to stand at the top of the High Street and shout it to the world.
And so the days passed. Eventually, of course, Sophie had to stop work. We’d discussed this, of course, and Sophie had decided that she would not go back until the child was at school. At first, I was actually horrified at this. “You don’t have to be chained to the kitchen sink to be a mother, you know!” I said to her, repeating the feminist mantra which I had assumed was an article of faith to all women under forty.
© Karl Thornley 1999
