Helen Simpson Cockfosters

Julie meets up with her old friend Philippa in London in this exclusive story from Helen Simpson
Photograph: Charlotte Steeples Photography/Getty Images/Flickr RM

Green Park

It still might be a disaster but they had silently agreed to take it lightly. As soon as they got off at Green Park Julie realised she'd left them behind on the seat. For a couple of minutes they dithered on the platform wondering what to do, then Philippa had decided: Follow that train! They would hunt them down to the end of the line, always assuming that nobody else was tempted en route to make off with them.

"I mean, why would they," said Julie as they stood crushed shoulder to shoulder on the next train. "They'd be useless to anybody else. And I'm completely lost without them. I can't get used to it!"

"There's no way you're going back to Shropshire without them," said Philippa. "Not with your big Ofsted week coming up."

"It's because they're new," moaned Julie. "I hate them."

"You'll get used to them."

"Not in a million years. Oh, I suppose so. I'm sorry about the Delacroix," said Julie, as they hunched their shoulders and braced themselves against a fresh crowd surging on at Leicester Square.

"This is better in a way," said Philippa, flashing her a smile. "This way we'll be able to carry on talking."

The two of them had conspired to spend a couple of hours on art, but now that time was promised to the Piccadilly line. Although they had not seen each other for years, they had instantly been returned to an unstrained intimacy, as unexpected as it was welcome. At school together in south London, they had found it easy to stay in touch in their twenties, and still possible in a shell-shocked way round babies in their early thirties; then Julie and her husband had moved north and it was the roaring forties that had forced friendship to take a back seat in the interests of survival. Now, though, they had started to crawl up out of their burrows, as Philippa put it, and emerge blinking into the sunlight.

Covent Garden

"The worst thing about needing glasses is the bumbling," said Julie. "I've turned into a bumbler overnight. Me! I run marathons!"

They clung on dodging and twisting as a flood of tourists disgorged itself at Covent Garden.

"I realised what things had come to when I found myself trying to read a map in the rain last time I was on holiday," she continued. "There I was fumbling with my glasses, dropping them, trying and failing to unfold a map I couldn't read, all the time holding an umbrella over my head like a circus clown."

"Look, quick, there's two seats," said Philippa.

"Suddenly I can't see the food on the plate in front of me," ranted Julie, "not unless I screw one eye up and peer really hard out of the other. I never thought I'd end up girning at my dinner like a mad pirate. That curry was delicious, by the way."

They had exchanged a decade's worth of high-density news about children and work the night before, Julie as voluble and volatile as ever, while Philippa dished up the rogan josh.

"Supermarket Special," said Philippa. "I'm too tired to cook by the end of the week. Or the start of it, if I'm honest."

"It was great," said Julie. "The thing is, I don't like wearing them, I don't like the feeling of having a contraption on my face. Imagine kissing someone else when you're both wearing glasses – it'd be like the clashing of antlers."

King's Cross St Pancras

As well as putting the two of them back in touch with each other, Philippa told Julie, her recent forays into Facebook and Friends-reunited.com had revealed that at least fifty percent of their contemporaries were now unabashedly grey-headed and bespectacled. She herself had had her hair razored into short grey splinters, a look she sought to soften by wearing interesting earrings. Meanwhile Julie's hair, foxy with henna, still touched her shoulders.

"And I've put on a stone in the last year," said Philippa. "I know I should take more exercise. What is it we're supposed to do now? Salsa. Zumba! Line dancing?"

"No, line-dancing is a step too far," said Julie. "That's for ten years' time. Yee-ha!"

"Actually, I thought I might try rock-climbing," said Philippa shyly.


"There's a climbing wall just up the road from me in Crystal Palace."

"Use it or lose it!" said Julie, hoping she hadn't let her incredulity show. "That's another reason I don't like glasses – they're no good for anything active like that."

"What about contact lenses?"

"Yeah, I started off with them, but it was like poking myself in the eye every morning getting them in, and just as bad getting them out. Then when I got the knack I found they just weren't as good for reading as I'd hoped, and someone at school told me how they cut the oxygen to the cornea and one of his had travelled right up underneath the eyelid towards the back of the eyeball. He'd had to go to hospital to get it taken out so that put me right off. Because whatever you do you mustn't fall asleep when you're wearing them or you'll asphyxiate your eyes."

"Oh I'm always falling asleep," said Philippa. "I fall asleep at the drop of a hat."

The train had now stopped at King's Cross St Pancras, and they watched as a young woman struggled to make her way into the crowded compartment with a suitcase and a baby in a sling and two small children.

"I'm very glad I'm not doing that any more," said Philippa with quiet fervour.

"Yes," said Julie. "I do wonder what happens next, though. Because the current story is, we get more assertive, we cast them all off without a backward glance and move on. We're supposed to leave the nurturing role behind with our oestrogen, see."

"That doesn't sound very likely," said Philippa, considering. "No, I can't see how that would work. They all still really need me. And then, what about the aged parents?"

"Oh don't," groaned Julie. "I'm up and down the M1 like a yo-yo."

Holloway Road

Philippa was telling Julie more about her internet discoveries. She had tracked down a surprising number of their old classmates from the school they had attended together in New Addington. Suzanne Fowler had married the boy with the car who used to pick her up at the school gates, she'd gone into nursing then had three children and now she was divorced. Hilary Trundle, who'd left after O-levels to work in Dolcis, was on tamoxifen for breast cancer, she'd set up a blog about it. And Tina Jakes, having TEFL-ed her way round most of south-east Asia, was running a martial arts centre in Thornton Heath.

"Tina Jakes? The netball queen?"

"That's the one."

"THIS is a Piccadilly line train to Cockfosters", declared a loud voice, and they stopped talking while it repeated its assertion.

"Piccadilly," said Julie dreamily. "Piccadilly. Accommodation! Do you remember the time they got that woman from the secretarial college to come and give us a talk? That was the third option, wasn't it, if you couldn't face teaching or nursing. Do you remember, she held out the carrot that one day you might work your way up to be personal assistant to a very important man! Talk about the glittering prizes."

"We were being trained to serve others," commented Philippa. "That was what it was."

"She also warned us there were certain words which were hard to spell, that no decent secretary would bring shame on herself by getting Piccadilly or accommodation wrong."

"Double c double m?" said Philippa. "Only three of us went on to university. That was normal then, of course."

"And as soon as we left uni, computers came in and that was the end of that," continued Julie. "Secretaries are like coal-miners now, aren't they; they're a dying breed. We're not fifty yet but when you think of it, not having had email in our youth makes us positively antediluvian."

"Oh, good word! You can tell you did English."

"Yeah, I can spell it," growled Julie. "I just can't read it."

"Of course you could always get them lasered," said Philippa. "Though my deputy head had it done and she said you have to stay awake during it with your eyelids pulled apart by clamps and there's a terrible smell of burning."

"Ugh! Like that film with the eyeball and the razorblade. What was it called? You know. Black and white, French; a cloud goes over the moon."

"I don't know."

"It'll come to me," said Julie grimly.


"I can't bear to think how much they cost," said Julie, "And then to lose them … Remember that poem about losing stuff? Her mother's watch, de da de da. But I've forgotten who it's by. I really am losing it."

"You haven't lost them," said Philippa. "They'll be waiting for us at Cockfosters."

"The optician told me that forty-seven is when it happens, that's the average age for when your eyes go and it was spot on for me," said Julie. "The money I've handed over to that man in the last year!"

They fell silent as the train picked up speed on its reckless way out of Arsenal, rattling all over as it belted them along.

I've always been a bit of a loser, thought Julie; the year I was eleven I left my swimming bag on the bus almost every Thursday. She cast back to the sensation of her chlorinated hair in a dripping elastic-banded ponytail on the long crawl back to recover the bag from the bus depot. Then there were all the keys over the years, not to mention the gloves … I've been doing this ever since I can remember, she thought; it's good practice for the future I suppose, though I still haven't got used to it after all this time.

Turnpike Lane

The crowds had thinned out and their carriage was only half full.

"You know those feelings we're supposed to start feeling now?" said Julie, off on another track. "You know, now they're off at uni, what are we here for if we're not able to have babies any more – now that we've probably only got one or two chances to have a last one?"

"Perish the thought."

"Well I'm not," continued Julie.

"You mean, mourning the loss of fertility?" said Philippa cautiously.

"Yes. That. I've figured it's OK as long as it doesn't go hand in glove with the loss of, um, sex."

"Oh I don't know," said Philippa.


"He's so grumpy. You saw what he was like last night when you arrived, he wouldn't look away from the football to say hello until I gave him a shove."

"He was just tired."

"No, he's always like that."

"Elizabeth Bishop!" said Julie. "That's who wrote that poem. I knew it would come to me."

"Well done," said Philippa.

Bounds Green

A little after Bounds Green the train surged into daylight for the first time, and they could see house roofs and a little gasworks through the window.

"When Ellie went to Leeds Met, we decided to split up for a while," said Philippa. "We didn't move out or anything, that would have been too expensive, but we gave each other space if you get my meaning."

"Oh, I'm sorry."

"No it's alright, we decided to stay together in the end, we're going to Thailand at Christmas. But it was an interesting time. First thing he did was join a website called NewPartner.com. It wasn't hard to guess his password so I used to log on to his computer every day, have a look at the women who'd winked him …

"Winked him?"

"… technical term. Then I'd turn his score back to zero."

"Wow," said Julie.

"I know him," shrugged Philippa. "He'd described himself as athletic and toned like all the other men coming up to fifty, whereas the women – also self-deluded, equally so – said they liked walks in the rain and going to the cinema."


"But they don't like going to the cinema, do you get what I'm saying; the most they can manage is a DVD on a Saturday night with a takeaway."

Arnos Grove

"I can't really see what's out there any more," said Julie, peering through the window. "That's as well as not being able to read or tell whether it's a bee or a wasp."

"You need varifocals," said Philippa.

"That's what I've got," said Julie. "Or rather, what I had."

"My mother says they changed her life, but you can't walk downstairs in them, and if you go to the theatre you have to sit in the stalls not the circle."


"I don't know. But it's very expensive."

"What I want is what I had before. I want to be able to read a book and see out of the window. I know, I know; if I get them back I really ought to wear them all the time. It just seems a shame to spoil what little I've got left. Vanity!"

"Why don't you decide to enjoy it?" suggested Philippa. "Nobody notices a middle-aged woman in glasses, you could get away with murder."

"True," laughed Julie.


The train had slowed to a rest outside Oakwood station. They sat gazing at a group of silver birches on a cutting between the railway tracks.

"It's annoying not knowing how long we've got left, don't you think?" said Julie.

"Thirty years," said Philippa. "Forty!"

"Or ten," said Julie. "Or two. It would be good to know on some level, sort of subconsciously, don't you think? In order to pace ourselves. It would be so useful when it came to money, for example, knowing whether you ought to be worrying about your pension or if you knew you'd only got a year left you could blow it all on a really good holiday."

"A bit depressing, though, the holiday, if you knew what was coming next?"

"Well, it would have to be subconscious, the knowledge," said Julie. "Obviously."

A voice boomed out over the speaker system: "The next station is Cockfosters. This train will terminate there. Please ensure you take all your personal belongings with you."

"Now they tell me. But Philippa, the more I think about it, the more I see it's up to us to get on and plan lovely times and do what we want to do because any minute now we could be disabled with a stroke, paralysed from the neck down!"

"A stroke?" chortled Philippa. "Why not a heart attack or cancer?"

"It was in the paper yesterday," admitted Julie. "You can't always tell if someone's had a stroke so you have to ask them to stick their tongue out. That's the latest test for it."


As the train drew in to its destination, they were giggling and sticking their tongues out at each other like the silly schoolgirls they had once been together.

Waiting on the platform were more than half-a-dozen cleaners with plastic bags and pincers poised to clear the carriages.

"They look efficient," said Philippa, impressed.


"It obviously happens all the time, people forgetting stuff, leaving stuff behind."

"Le Chien Andalou!" cried Julie. "That was the film I was telling you about!"

And she punched the air in triumph.

"Well done," said Philippa.

By the time they had managed to recover the lost varifocals from the supervisor's office, their spirits were high and still rising. Sunlight flooded the station concourse and stopped them in their tracks for a moment. They stood side by side, blinking, smiling.

"This train will terminate here," came a station announcement. "Cockfosters station. This is the end of the line."

"But not for us," quipped Philippa, laughing, patting her friend's arm.

Then, once they had paused to check the departures board, they hurried over to the far platform where the next train stood in readiness, ticking over, waiting to take them back into town.

helen simpson Photograph: Linda Nylind

Helen Simpson has written five collections of short stories. She was on the Granta "best of young British novelists" list in 1993, and has won awards including the Somerset Maugham award, the Hawthornden
prize and the EM Forster award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in London

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