Oxford.
Snow up to my knees.
My daughter is taking me to have dinner a la Harry Potter in the Gothic dining room of Keble where she currently immerses herself in apocalyptic texts in the School of Divinity. Yes, laugh if you like, but I have a daughter who is going to be a Doctor of Divinity - though just at the moment she's flogging children's books at Waterstones to the navy blue of Oxford.
We're having tea in the newly refurbished Ashmoleum. Outside there's a foot of snow covering the terrace on which a lone classical figure hunches, his shoulders burdened with two white icicled epaulettes. He makes me feel cold just looking at him though the museum is toasty warm and redolent of the smell of damp felt and mothy wool.
A waiter approaches. Professionally French with a comma of black fringe over one eye, he shrugs, leans on one hip and pouts.
'Do you have a menu?' I ask.
'We 'ave tea, coffee, and some cakes,' He says.
'What kind of tea?' (Look I'm pedantic but 'tea' is a generic term.)
Another pout. 'English Breakfast, Peppermint, Camomile...'
I wait.
'...Earl Grey.'
He waits.
'Okay, Earl Grey then. With lemon.'
'What about the cake?' Asks my, she-isn't-on-a-diet, daughter.
'Oh I fink we have carrot and chocolate and somefing...' He says airily and wafts his hand in the general direction of the bar where no cakes seem to be on display. It's odd to think we're in a restaurant as the food seems almost incidental, not to say inconvenient.
She settles for a hot chocolate as does my friend from days of yore who has joined us, and we all pass on the mystery cake.
My friend used to share a house with me. Back then he was a member of the Socialist Workers Party, but perfectly normal beforehand when his hair was not unlike the French waiter's but with a few flecks of grey, and his face, cherubic and cheeky. It's all gone now. But actually it had gone even then since he shaved it off to stubble and got a few earrings when he joined the party. I think that was the entrance fee. We had been great friends back in the bedsit days, but didn't have much in common once he started selling Socialist Worker outside Boots. However divorce is a great reuniter of old friends just as time is a great healer of relationships, as well as a smoother of previous political convictions. His have gone the same way as the stubble. Now he's clean and shiny, with a polished head and a polished face and scant sign of piercings in his ear though you can still see the dimples if you look closely. My specs are so strong I can see craters on the moon. We have no secrets... He even has rosy cheeks which he tries to pass off as a consequence of the cold but I think it's a symptom of middle England myself. He has kids at prep school, and like me, a partner who made him redundant. She was also a Socialist Worker in the late seventies. Now she's in the City.
I stir my tea with its treasure of three slices of lemon smiling up from the bottom of the cup - I wonder if the waiter thinks I'm sour - and look around the room. Eldest daughter is looking at a squirming three year old at the next table with some distaste.
'You know, when I was your age and lived here on Banbury Road, I used to go out with your father on a Sunday and we'd do exactly this - go to a museum, or a film, or to a concert in one of the colleges, and I'd look at all these navy blue people with their cut glass accents and messy, scrunchied hair, in their sensible shoes and with their grubby children called Jeremy and Jemima and want it all with a passion. I wanted to be them. I didn't want to live in a freezing bedsit in North Oxford with a two bar electric fire that was one more than I could afford to run on my pathetic salary, seeing my boyfriend once a week when he managed to drag himself away from London, trailing round the Botanical Gardens and looking through other people's windows in Park Town where there was always a fire burning in the grate and book-lined rooms where someone played the violin. I wanted the violin. I wanted the kids on the back of the bicycle going to the Squirrel School and the chintz skirt and the upholstery to match. I wanted to be conventional and middle class.'
I say this waiting for Rob to shoot me down in flames, but people in combustible houses don't throw napalm.
'And I got it.' I add.
My daughter doesn't react. Her childhood is all she knows. She grew up in violin-land, though in fact we had drums, piano, guitar and recorders but never the violin. We had, and have, the shabby, book-lined rooms that now I'd be delighted to get rid of but the ex refuses to pack his books up and take them to his new flat. We had the tow-headed, grubby children and despite my Scottish speech impediment, I even got some cut glass accents and a notch up the class ladder for me, and a few down for the ex, at ten grand a year London day schools.
Nevertheless, we are still not the most conventional of families. I mean I don't think mummy and daddy Navy-Blue take Jemima and Jeremy to see a Burlesque Striptease for their Christmas treat.
Indeed, my friend took his kids to the Messiah.
But Oxford, where I grew up, got married (twice), fell in love (four times) and lived from the age of 17 to 25 always makes me maudlin. It's like being a ghost and haunting yourself. You meet friends, like the ex Socialist Worker, who is now wearing a cashmere sweater and a blazer (and it's not even red, but powder blue) - or Mimo, who owns Ash-Shami, the Lebanese Restaurant. I saw him in St Giles and stopped and talked to him as though he was still my husband's landlord in Walton Well Road and I was going to see him later in the basement kitchen while I made a salad with newly discovered iceberg restaurant, that twenty-eight years later I wouldn't even consider a vegetable. I see my younger self walking along the Corn Market in a succession of fashion mistakes, with long red hair instead of bottle blonde, carrying half my body weight but heavy with anxieties. And the nostalgia, the regret, the sense of loss for what was falls upon me like the snow that's swirling through the black afternoon and traps me.
I look at the table beyond us. There's a man with silver hair and a matching woman, slim and petite in the ubiquitous navy blue uniform. Another couple in their late middle age sit next to them and there are two daughters, one of whom has a child. I try to work out if the two older women are sisters - they both have the same frame and grey, page-boy styled hair, but I can't be sure. The two men, however, are definitely their well-worn, long-accustomed husbands, and one of them is the father of the girls though I don't know which woman he's married to until she stands up and he helps her on with her coat.
'So, I used to look at the young couples and want their life, but now I look at the older couples, and think - I want that too.' I say, gesturing at the people who are now gathering up their belongings and slotting the baby into a stroller, preparing to leave. 'I want to be sitting here on the weekend with my husband of many years, having just had tea with my grown up children and our friends, or our in laws.'
My daughter looks uncomfortable, as though I'm saying that she, on her own, isn't enough of a pleasure, but it isn't that - it's that I'm longing for a fantasy of the life I thought I had already bought into, and paid all the instalments on, and only had to cash in. And you never compromise in fantasies. I mean, you don't dream of going to bed with someone who looks like George Clooney but shorter and a bit fat round the middle - you dream about George Ruddy Clooney!
My friend looks as glum as I feel. 'I know what you mean. That's what I wanted, what I still want...' He says and looks so sad that I immediately feel I have to dust myself down and get rid of all these chilly reminiscences - we can't both be sitting here, miserable about what was lost. But then, I remember when he wanted Revolution and brown rice and thought that all property was theft. Sometimes, thank goodness, you don't get what you want. And it's no bad thing.
I drain the last of my tea, button up my pink cardie to keep the cold off my cleavage, I tuck my bottle blonde hair into my vintage Dior coat that once belonged to the ex-husband's aunt, and which the daughter and I share (though she wears it as a cross over, and I button it straight), shuffle my feet across the floor until I find my totally unsuitable-for-snow-shoes which I've kicked off, throw round the fake fur stole and pull on the gloves lined with orange fur that is not fake. I check my lipstick and add a dab more red, pick up the zebra patterned pony-skin handbag, link arms with my agnostic Dr of Divinity daughter, and my ex Socialist Worker friend who muffles himself into a sleek black overcoat, and the three of us set off for the slush like The Scarecrow, the Lion and the Tin Man.
Actually, all things considered, it's probably a huge blessing in disguise that I didn't turn out to be navy blue.
