Read Online Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy by Helen Fielding - Free Book Online

ushered me into the familiar sitting room and Magda waved cheerily from the drinks table. Magda, who I met at Bangor University, is actually my oldest friend. I looked around at all the faces I’d known since my early twenties, once the original Sloane Rangers, older now. All the couples who seemed to get married like a line of falling dominoes when they were thirty-one, still together: Cosmo and Woney, Pony and Hugo, Johnny and Mufti. And there was the same sense I’d had for all that time – of being a duck out of water, unable to join in what they were talking about because I was at a different stage of life, even though I was the same age. It was as though there had been a seismic timeshift and my life was happening years behind theirs, in the wrong way.
    ‘Oh, Bridget! Jolly good to see you. Goodness, you’ve lost weight. How are you?’
    Then there was the sudden flash in the eyes, the remembering of the whole widowhood thing: ‘How ARE the children? How are they doing?’
    Not so Cosmo, Woney’s husband, a successful, confident-though-egg-shaped fund manager, who came charging up like a blunderbuss.
    ‘So! Bridget! Still on your own? You’re looking very chipper. When are we going to get you married off again?’
    ‘Cosmo!’ said Magda indignantly. ‘Zip it.’
    One advantage of widowhood is that – unlike being single in your thirties, which, because it is ostensibly all your own fault, allows Smug Marrieds to say anything they like – it does usually introduce some element of tact. Unless, of course, you’re Cosmo.
    ‘Well, it’s been long enough now, hasn’t it?’ he crashed on. ‘Can’t carry on wearing widow’s weeds for ever.’
    ‘Yes, but the trouble is—’
    Woney joined in. ‘It’s very hard for middle-aged women who find themselves single.’
    ‘Please don’t say “middle-aged”,’ I purred, trying to imitate Talitha.
    ‘. . . I mean, look at Binko Carruthers. He’s no oil painting. But the second Rosemary left him he was inundated with women! Inundated! Throwing themselves at him.’
    ‘Hurling themselves,’ said Hugo enthusiastically. ‘Dinners, theatre tickets. Life of Riley.’
    ‘Yes, but they’re all “of a Certain Age”, aren’t they?’ said Johnny.
    Grrr. ‘Of a Certain Age’ is even worse than ‘middle-aged’ with its patronizing, only-ever-applied-to-women insinuations.
    ‘Meaning?’ said Woney.
    ‘Well, you know,’ Cosmo was bludgeoning on. ‘Chap gets a new lease of life, he’s going to go for something younger, isn’t he? Plump and fecund and—’
    Caught the quick flash of pain in Woney’s eyes. Woney, not an advocate of the Talitha school of branding, has allowed the fat-positioning of middle age freely to position itself all over her back and beneath her bra: her skin, falling exhausted into the folds of her experience, unpolished by facials, peels or light-reflecting make-up bases. She has let her once long and shiny dark hair go grey, and cut it short, which only serves to emphasize the disappearance of the jawline (which as Talitha says, can be quickly glossed over with some well-cut, face-framing layers), and has gone for a Zara version of the structured black frock and high ruffled collar favoured by Maggie Smith in Downton Abbey .
    I sense Woney has done this, or rather not done any ‘rebranding’, presumably not out of ‘feminism’ as such, but partly out of an old-fashioned British sense of personal honesty; partly because she can’t be arsed; partly out of self-belief and confidence; partly because she doesn’t define herself by how she looks or her sexuality; and, perhaps, mainly because she feels herself loved unconditionally for who she is: albeit by Cosmo who, in spite of his spherical physique,yellow teeth, hairless scalp and unbridled eyebrows, clearly feels he would be unconditionally loved by any woman lucky enough to have him.
    But for a second, at that flash of pain in Woney’s eyes, I felt a surge of sympathy,