It is like ....ering Heights here with lashing rain and whistling, screaming wind. The forecast was as hysterical as usual, warning of severe gales with structural damage lasting for several days. I decided to panic when something actually happened, for once, and did not kill myself rushing about putting candles everywhere, ready for endless darkness or laying fires or finding hot water bottles. F@ck it. My only precaution was to ask my daughter in London to tape the last episode of S... and the C... in case the electricity went off in the middle. It is so far 24 hours of medium gale, not so bad but really noisy. Now I have seen S.. and the C... it can do its worst. (Rather patchy, rushed ending I thought - as if they hadn't spent as much time on the last twenty minutes as the rest of the episode. Everyone is cross about Miranda being left with a crap life. In 'Which S.. and the C... Girl Are You?', I was Miranda and feel a personal interest in her welfare.)

I was reading an article about amusing, cutting edge women who have a best friend who is much older. I noticed an odd thing which was that all the pairs looked exactly like each other with the same hair style and clothes sense. I wonder if the older one picked on the younger out of subliminal vanity or the older reminded the younger of her mother. I have a great friend who is twenty years older than me and I met her twenty years ago. Of course she looks much older now but to talk to I am never concious of any difference between us. She also looks nothing like me, having wavy red hair and perfect legs so that she can wear shorts with confidence.

She has never married and has no children but does have a rewarding career and many, many friends. Her closest companion is her parrot who is judged to be about thirty years old so has about a hundred left to go, ensuring that my friend, B..., spends many hours worrying about what will happen to it when she is gone. The parrot dominates her entire life and is horribly indulged. It is quite normal to have a phone chat with B.. interrupted by sudden shrieks of 'No, noooooo Parrot. Stop, Not THAT... Oh well, never mind. All right then..'. 'What on earth is going on?' 'Oh, it had climbed up the bookcase and was ripping the back off one of my first editions but it doesn't really matter....'. B... seems perfectly content with the way that her life has turned out and moans far less than anyone else I know.

This is ironic as another old friend, L..., always held up B... as an awful warning of someone who had made tragically short-sighted Life choices. L..., herself, was in fact American but she had married a famous English academic as his child bride and become naturalised. After a few years she tired of provincial university life and ran away to London, where she became a femme fatale. We were living in Norfolk and I had just had my second baby when my husband appeared one weekend, all jolly, and said that he had invited two 'new friends' to stay as he knew that I would 'love' them especially the girl, called L.. He had been introduced to them in a 'literary' London pub that we used to frequent and we had many people in common. So their staying would be really 'easy' and not have to involve me screaming and running about cleaning and then crying because I was so tired and had been up all night with the baby and hated everyone. He said. By the time they arrived I had, of course, been doing all these things and was in a terse mood. This was not helped by L.. being gorgeous, drifting about chain smoking and chain drinking and laughing tinkliely while saying 'God, you are so AMAZING looking after little children like that. I don't think I would ever have the patience.... Does anyone want to play croquet while the sun's setting? And let's take all the wine outside'. While I stomped off frumpily to put the children to bed. Made even more irritating by having to call L.. in to the phone twice, to talk to some suicidal man who she had left in London when, as it turned out, she 'ran away' to our house with her new lover. This lover was not only a great deal younger than L... but had been the protege (with an accent) of the suicidal telephoner and the whole thing was really mean. She ponced about constantly, always with drooping cigarette and glass of wine, saying smugly how 'terrible' she felt about hurting him and how 'difficult' it was that he loved her so much. I loathed her.

My husband adored her. I even found that he had told her that it would be such an awful loss to the world if she never had children that she should have one and give it to me to bring up. As she was too wild and amusing to do anything so dull herself. I was f@cking annoyed. A year or so later, with my children that much older, I returned to being rather more wild and amusing myself and on one of her steadily more frequent visits I began to warm to her. We found more and more in common and eventually we were as close as THAT. Typically my husband was then totally left out. Ha! I even drunkenly offered to bring up her children for her ... and I meant it. 'No, no. Of course I want to have a baby and be a real mother, just not quite yet. I'm not sure I've found the right man, (currently about the twentieth person to have fallen insanely in love with her since the year before), but I'll do something about it soon. I mean, my worst horror is to end up like B..., you know, to wake up and find that you've frittered your life away on love affairs and suddenly you're too old to have children'. This turned into a familiar refrain whenever I saw her, particularly if I had my daughters with me. 'Oh, they're sooo sweet. I long for a baby of my own. Don't want to end up like B... Ha,ha..'.

Meanwhile she had 'bolted' from man after man, any of whom would have been happy to marry her. She seemed to only enjoy being wooed and won, romantically. As soon as things settled down and became domestic she was looking round for another conquest. The latest lover knew her reputation only too well and the day after he asked her to marry him he locked her into his upstairs flat as he left for work. No use. She managed to climb dangerously out of a high window and fled to the arms of the next man she had her eye on. And this turned out to be the end. He was, cunningly, separated but unable to get divorced as his wife could just about bear to live without him but only if they stayed legally married. Every time he even hinted about moving the situation on she would threaten, or on several occasions attempt, suicide. Not only that but she and their children rang him constantly as if he was still living with them and called him round to check the boiler etc. as a matter of course. She and the children also had many ongoing and fascinating problems which kept him on the phone for hours in the evenings. L... was totally upstaged. She fell desperately and grovellingly in love with him.

Two years passed. When I saw her I was shocked, she was very, very thin and had a nervous, unselfconfident air. She was still chain smoking. 'His wife won't hear of a divorce - she never will. I really think we should be trying hard to have a baby but he isn't that keen. He hasn't said No but he doesn't care as he's got three children already. I feel a bit mad sometimes, we never, ever talk about me. It's either his problems or his family's problems, I just come second all the time'. 'Err - this is obviously not the best moment - but I'M pregnant again and I wondered if you'd like to be godmother?' 'What! But you promised that next time we'd be pregnant at the same time and do everything together'. 'I know but this was actually a complete accident and anyway I'm getting older too. I can't keep putting it off'. When my son was born I rang her. She was charming and seemed thrilled to be his godmother. She came round a week later and held him, wondering at his tiny nails. She never saw him again.

Over the next ten years I only met her on a tiny number of occasions and always by chance. She was still with the same man and the same situation and by the end she was in her forties and too old to have children. She never mentioned B..'s name any more and nor did I. It would have been too cruel.
- posted by Iris @ 3/20/2004 08:28:00 PM comment