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AGE-GAP AFFAIRS

I WOULD be interested to read Joan Collins’s take on Julian Barnes’s latest novel The Only Story.

Dame Joan is around 30 years older than Percy Gibson, her husband of 15 years. The Only Story is told by Paul and recounts his long-term love affair with Susan Macleod, 29 years his senior.

They meet in the late Sixties. He is 19, home from university for the summer. Soon he is ‘falling smack into love’ with sparky Mrs Macleod.

‘It was a matter of some pride to me that I seemed to have landed on exactly the relationship of which my parents would most disapprove,’ reveals Paul. But the young man revelling in unconventionality has far less to lose than his partner, a married mother. This is a love story, but only fleetingly a happy one.

In books, as in life, no one is taken aback by a woman with an older man — think Jane Eyre, Emma or Rebecca — yet fictional relationships between an older woman and younger man are depicted as doomed, often deviant.

Sometimes they are, as in the recklessly irresponsible relationship in Zoe Heller’s Notes On A Scandal between the teacher Sheba Hart and her teenage pupil.

But Heller makes the point that the headline-grabbing affair echoes the courtship of Sheba and her older husband, a married lecturer when she was his art student.

Have the French a more sophisticated take on such relationships, as evidenced by the 24-year difference between President Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte? After re-reading Colette’s Chéri I remain unsure. It shows the relationship between Chéri, the son of a Parisian courtesan, and Léa, a contemporary of his mother’s, who undertakes his ‘education’. But Chéri graduates to an unhappy marriage to the young Edmée.

Would a novel in which a heroine grew old gracefully with a devoted younger lover at her side be so implausible? Perhaps Joan Collins could write one.