None of This is True

Josie can feel her husband’s discomfort as they enter the golden glow of the gastropub. She’s walked past this place a hundred times. Thought: Not for us. Everyone too young. Food on the chalkboard outside she’s never heard of. What is bottarga? But this year her birthday has fallen on a Saturday and this year she did not say, Oh, a takeaway and a bottle of wine will be fine, when Walter had asked what she wanted to do.

This year she thought of the honeyed glow of the Lansdowne, the buzz of chatter, the champagne in ice buckets on outdoor tables on warm summer days, and she thought of the little bit of money her grandmother had left her last month in her will, and she’d looked at herself in the mirror and tried to see herself as the sort of person who celebrated her birthday in a gastropub in Queen’s Park and she’d said, ‘We should go out for dinner.’

‘OK then,’ Walter had said. ‘Anywhere in mind?’

And she’d said, ‘The Lansdowne. You know. On Salusbury Road.’

He’d simply raised an eyebrow at her and said, ‘Your birthday. Your choice.’

He holds the door open for her now and she passes through. They stand marooned for a moment by a sign that says Please wait here to be seated and Josie gazes around at the early- evening diners and drinkers, her handbag pinioned against her stomach by her arms.

‘Fair,’ she says to the young man who appears holding a clipboard. ‘Josie. Table booked for seven thirty.’

He smiles from her to Walter and back again and says, ‘For two, yes?’

They are led to a nice table in a corner. Walter on a banquette, Josie on a velvet chair. Their menus are handed to them clipped to boards. She’d looked up the menu online earlier, so she’d be able to google stuff if she didn’t know what it was, so she already knows what she’s having. And they’re ordering champagne. She doesn’t care what Walter thinks.

Her attention is caught by a noisy entrance at the pub door. A woman walks in clutching a balloon with the words Birthday Queen printed on it. Her hair is winter blonde, cut into a shape that makes it move like liquid. She wears wide-legged trousers and a top made of two pieces of black cloth held together with laces at the sides. Her skin is burnished. Her smile is wide. A group soon follows behind her, other similarly aged people; someone is holding a bouquet of flowers; another carries a selection of posh gift bags.

‘Alix Summer!’ says the woman in a voice that carries. ‘Table for fourteen.’

‘Look,’ says Walter, nudging her gently. ‘Another birthday girl.’

Josie nods distractedly. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Looks like it.’

The group follows the waiter to a table just across from Josie’s. Josie sees three ice buckets already on the table, each holding two bottles of chilled champagne. They take their seats noisily, shouting about who should sit where and not wanting to sit next to their husbands for God’s sake, and the woman called Alix Summer directs them all with that big smile while a tall man with red hair who is probably her husband takes the balloon from her hand and ties it to a chair back. Soon they are all seated, and the first bottles of champagne are popped and poured into fourteen glasses held out by fourteen people with tanned arms and gold bracelets and crisp white shirt sleeves and they all bring their glasses together, those at the furthest ends of the table getting to their feet to reach across the table, and they all say, ‘To Alix! Happy birthday!’

Josie fixes the woman in her gaze. ‘How old do you reckon she is?’ she asks Walter.

‘Christ. I dunno. It’s hard to tell these days. Early forties, maybe?’

Josie nods. Today is her forty-fifth birthday. She finds it hard to believe. Once she’d been young and she’d thought forty-five would come slow and impossible. She’d thought forty-five would be another world. But it came fast and it’s not what she thought it would be. She glances at Walter, at the fading glory of him, and she wonders how different things would be if she hadn’t met him.

She’d been thirteen when they met. He was quite a bit older than her; well, a lot older than her, in fact. Everyone was shocked at the time, except her. Married at nineteen. A baby at twenty-two. Another one at twenty-four. A life lived in fast forward and now, apparently, she should peak and crest and then come slowly, contentedly down the other side, but it doesn’t feel as if there ever was a peak, rather an abyss formed of trauma that she keeps circling and circling with a knot of dread in the pit of her stomach.

Walter is retired now, his hair has gone and so has a lot of his hearing and his eyesight, and his mid-life peak is somewhere so far back in time and so mired in the white-hot intensity of rearing small children that it’s almost impossible to remember what he was like at her age.

She orders feta and sundried tomato flatbread, followed by tuna tagliata (‘The word TAGLIATA derives from the verb TAGLIARE, to cut’) with mashed cannellini beans, and a bottle of Veuve Clicquot (‘Veuve Clicquot’s Yellow Label is loved for its rich and toasty flavours’) and she grabs Walter’s hand and runs her thumb over the age-spotted skin and asks, ‘Are you OK?’

‘Yes, of course. I’m fine.’

‘What do you think of this place, then?’

‘It’s . . . yeah. It’s fine. I like it.’

Josie beams. ‘Good,’ she says. ‘I’m glad.’

She lifts her champagne glass and holds it out towards Walter’s. He touches his glass against hers and says, ‘Happy birthday.’