LIFE IS FLEETING, SO GRAB HAPPINESS WHEN YOU CAN
It’s never too late to find someone to watch TV with, unscrew jam jars and, best of all, lie beside at night. Novelist Deborah Moggach celebrates the joys of her later-in-life marriage
Deborah Moggach on finding love
So here I am, 70 – 70! – and married all over again. How weird is that? I was married once, a long time ago. It lasted 11 years and produced two glorious children, who are now in their 40s – their 40s! – and have children of their own. In the intervening years, I’ve had two long romances, but neither led to marriage. The first was with the cartoonist Mel Calman, who was 18 years older than me. We never lived together; it never crossed our minds. It simply wasn’t that sort of relationship. At the time, I had two small children and I didn’t want to foist them on him or, indeed, foist him on them. He’d been married twice before and maybe we both sensed we wanted something different.
Mel lived in the middle of Soho and I lived in North London. For 10 extraordinarily happy years, we visited each other several times a week, but never had a domestic life. I didn’t even keep a toothbrush in his flat. For reasons I never quite fathomed, but just knew, cohabitation would have killed the whole thing dead. So we never had boring conversations about bin liners, we never had sulks or resentments, we never had tensions about my kids and we certainly never talked about marriage.
After Mel died, I fell in love with a Hungarian artist, who was 15 years younger than me. Again, marriage didn’t cross our minds. He was a free spirit and so was I. We had seven blissful years together until the whole thing fell apart.
The weird thing was that with both of these relationships, I totally forgot my own age. One man so much older, one so much younger. I seesawed between being skittish and youthful, and a wise old bird. To some extent, I think we all feel this. Age is such a fluid thing nowadays. We go abseiling in our 80s; we discover we’re gay; we bail out and go to live in India, like my characters in The Best Exotic
Marigold Hotel. Many of us don’t get married at all. We
simply don’t behave like our parents did, and it’s a good thing, too.
So why on earth did I do it again? I wasn’t looking for marriage. I was, however, looking for love. When my relationship with the artist ended, I endured eight barren years, a Sahara of sexual deprivation. I discovered a truth that I’d written about often enough: all the attractive men were married or had copped off with younger models. I started burning with envy; envy towards elderly couples walking hand-in-hand on Hampstead Heath, greeting grandchildren at Victoria Station, consulting cinema listings in Patisserie Valerie, strolling through the Saatchi Gallery, getting prescriptions together, catching each other’s eyes at parties, going on weekend breaks to Lisbon, doing everything together. I missed that, horribly.
WEDDED BLISS
Many of my friends were perfectly happy to live alone; they’d hung up their spurs long ago and loved the independence. I didn’t. I liked the companionship of a man about the place. But, by this time, I was 60. Was that really too old? I didn’t feel 60. Who does? So I signed up to Guardian Soulmates and had the excruciating task of trying to sell myself in a few words. And the even more excruciating experience of meeting strange men over a glass of wine and bowl of crisps. Lots of people do this, of course, but that doesn’t stop it feeling odd. It’s very slightly sexy – after all, you’re smartening yourself up to meet somebody you might go to bed with. And yet, it’s not sexy at all, because it’s so very awkward and lacking in spontaneity.
Over the next few years, I met around 10 men. I’d date for a bit and then give up. Finally, I met Mark: tall, dark, slim and, most unusually, a lot more attractive than his photo. We started tentatively going out. To my relief, he’d always liked women of his own age (a rarity, this!). He was a journalist and we had a lot in common; even some friends, as it happened. And we’d both had a somewhat chequered past.
Slowly, we fell in love. It’s funny how it’s the same old thing, whatever one’s age. How many kisses are on his texts? Shall I phone him now or would that seem too keen? One’s still a teenager, just more wrinkly. Like a teenager, I was still up for adventure. So I moved out of London and started a new life with Mark in Wales, where he lived. And, in our mid-60s, we got married.
This was Mark’s idea. He’d had many girlfriends in the past, but nothing had lasted more than a couple of years
The number of brides and grooms aged 65 and over jumped from 7,468 in 2004 to 10,937 in 2014. That’s an increase of 46%.
and he’d never made that commitment. I was easy either way, so thought, ‘Why not give it a whirl?’ We had a terrific wedding in the small Welsh town where he lived and knew everybody. One friend dressed up as a chauffeur and drove us to the venue in his Bentley bedecked with flowers. We’d forgotten to order a cake, so another friend gave us a cardboard one (who likes wedding cake anyway?). It was larky and eccentric and, this time round, strangely less daunting. After all, we weren’t going to start a family. We’ve only a certain amount of time left, so we might as well make the most of it. The bumpy romances in our pasts have hopefully made us a bit wiser, or at least given us some perspective. There are plenty of ghosts in our cupboards, but I’ve found it a huge relief to live, at last, with somebody my own age, who remembers Biba and Cliff Michelmore. We’re in it together, and it’s cosy to complain about our aches and pains and lie in bed listening to The Today Programme. It’s companionable to go to the cinema together, or go nowhere at all and slump in front of the telly. After years alone, it’s lovely to have someone fixing my computer, booking holidays, unscrewing jam jars and, best of all, lying beside me in the small hours of the night. Of course, it might not last. None of the others did. But by the time one’s 70, one’s realised that life is fleeting, so one better grab a bit of happiness when one can. I’m not all together wise, but I’m wise enough to know that.
The Carer (Tinder Press) by Deborah Moggach is out 11 July