The weatherman had forecast a cold front arriving speedily from the east during the course of the day. As soon as our two guests arrived we eagerly debated this with them. It seemed incredible. The sea was sparkling under a cloudless sky and the sun was getting hotter by the minute. The lovely settled weather we’d been enjoying looked set fair to continue. Had we heard right, we wondered?
But our guests had heard the same forecast, and the weatherman had sounded as unequivocal to them as he’d sounded to us. The proprietor of the hotel they were staying at, clearly a man with his guests’ best interests at heart, had heard it, too, and he’d taken the trouble to warn them about the predicted change in the weather during breakfast. In case you didn’t know, the weather is the staple of our conversation here in these coastal retirement villages. The weather, that is, lightly garnished with news of the latest illnesses and deaths.
I poured the teas and passed round the cake. We had a china teapot on a tray, and cups and saucers, and a bought jam sponge, and silly little cake forks to eat it with, and paper napkins decorated with holly leaves left over from Christmas.
They visit the area for three days every spring, Joan and Jack, to visit friends and lay flowers on various graves. And they always make a point, every year, of calling in for a cup of tea. For this house was once a residential home for the elderly run by my parents, and Joan’s mother was one of the last residents. The cake was added when we realised the occasion had evolved into a yearly ritual.
I remember Joan’s mother very well. She had tons of class and a Benny Hill-type sense of humour. During the war she was one of those young Air Force women who plotted the vicissitudes of the Battle of Britain by leaning across a huge map and pushing markers around on the end of a long stick. And when she wasn’t doing that she was raising the pilots’ morale by dating as many of them as she could fit in. Her enjoyment of the war reached such a pitch that she couldn’t take anything seriously ever again, and she looked back on those war years as the time in her life when she was most truly and wonderfully alive. She had more pilots than she had hot dinners by the sound of it.
So Joan and Jack’s annual visit is an act of remembrance, and perhaps in some ways also a tribute to the passing of that generation whose freedom of speech now strikes us as naïve and astonishing. Joan and Jack stay for about an hour, no longer. When we finally leave the subject of the weather, we move on to the subject of how old we are all getting and which bits no longer work.
And John, who has wrecked his circulation and lungs with cigarette smoking, and can barely walk now, makes his usual joke that you are only as old as the woman you feel. And as we always do, we laugh heartily at this. And we laugh again at his joke about doing his shoelace up and wondering if there’s anything else he could be doing while he is down there, and again at the one about being on a seafood diet, in spite of having heard the same witty asides every year for the past seven years. But that’s fine. I’m not above laughing at pathetic old jokes.
But as I sat there this year discussing the weather forecast, and laughing at the usual one-liners, bobbing up to pour more tea, or cut more cake, I felt a certain strangeness, an alienation, as though I was experiencing the polite occasion at much more than the usual one-remove from reality. What had gone wrong, I wondered? Had we become strangers over the years, in spite of our annual 60 minutes of tea and cake and protestations of eternal friendship on the doorstep afterwards? Or, much worse, had talking about the weather with good, kind people somehow become a waste of my valuable time?
I am happy to say it was neither. The peculiar feeling was in fact the first unconscious inklings of an attack by the virulent norovirus. An hour and a half after we’d waved them a cheery goodbye, I was lying on the floor of the lavatory, trousers down, in a right old state. (Have you had it yet? It lasts about 24 hours. My God.) But you know what? The forecast was dead right. When I finally tottered out of there, several pounds lighter, the weather had turned right around, and I had to go around closing the windows.
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