Unexpected Lessons in Love

"It is really an extraordinary story. Bernardine was exactly my age; we were at Cambridge together. Shortly after leaving she published two novels. She published earlier than I did, which she was sometimes keen to point out to me. I went on being a novelist, but she stopped and had other careers. But when she was in her seventies, she developed cancer and had to give up her practice as a psychotherapist. She decided that she’d ‘just write some novels’, and she did, and they are very, very good. She found a whole second self. In those last three novels she wrote, she was just writing for the joy of writing. She returned to her first love and was happy doing it. I read this novel before it had a publisher, and I absolutely loved the way she remembered what it was like holding a baby when she was a grandmother, and the cat. The cat and the baby are just so wonderfully done. Their reactions to each other are so charming. I thought that was brilliant. I think one can make close, new friends in old age. In the novel, they become very good friends through their medical problem. It’s quite a common way of meeting somebody — in a hospital waiting room. I have made one or two good new friends of roughly my own age: people who’ve written to me, and one slightly younger friend who takes me for walks in Somerset. He is very sweet, he holds my hand in case I fall on the rocks. We have a shared interest in the seashore. I wrote to him and said I needed to do some research about it. So I’ve found a friend who absolutely loves going with me. You can make a good new friend if you have a common interest — it needn’t be illness, but it could be. It can happen. You’re very busy in your middle life, you don’t have time to see some of the friends you made when you were young. Then, when you all retire and get older, you’ve got time again and you go on little outings, even abroad. When people are ageing, they often remember their childhood very vividly. This year, I went to Genoa and Turin with two old school friends and we had a great time, even though I don’t see them regularly. It is just that we are now free to go on a little spree. That’s very nice. I don’t, except in the way that you’ve just mentioned. There’s an afterlife in that books go on, and are read for very strange reasons, sometimes. Jo reads these obscure books and gets a lot of pleasure out of them. The authors wouldn’t have expected them to have survived for so long. You can never tell. Another character finishes a friend’s tapestry. I finished my father’s tapestry, which he was doing when he was dying. I’ve still got the cushion that it’s on. So there is something about finishing things and ongoing life. Even the objects that I’ve made—and I’m not very good at making things for the house—do go on. As Penelope Lively says, the objects have their own history, and books obviously have more history than a cushion. You never know who’s going to remember what’s in them. He is a wonderful writer and still has devoted fans like Rose Tremain, who talk and write about him. People who really admire his work go on admiring it, and there might well be another wave of admirers. It‘s interesting when things get lost and are then recovered. Did you ever read that book Stoner ? That disappeared, then it was rediscovered and had a whole new vogue. I don’t know whether to go for the sublime or the ridiculous! Here’s the ridiculous: Don’t die falling down the stairs; always hold the banister. That was advice given to me a month or two ago by a good friend of mine, who’s in his eighties now. He and his wife watch 24 Hours in A&E , and he says that everyone over seventy is in there because they’ve fallen off their bicycle or fallen down the stairs. There are certain things that it’s just not sensible to risk. More sublimely, I think learning a new language is good. It’s slightly better for the brain than crossword puzzles, but it also teaches you a new world. I’m learning German poetry with a PhD student. We don’t do language—I don’t want to go shopping in Germany—but we read poems together, and that has given me great joy. It’s like entering into a new world that I knew was there but had never had the time or inclination to enter."