Cockfosters by Helen Simpson

Losing your glasses. Drinking too much at a book group. Getting the fridge fixed. Forgetting the names of things. Helen Simpson’s latest collection of stories is about getting older. It’s full of minutely observed details of life that sparkle in her hands: funny, knowing, true. She is a master of dialogue, which progresses in snippets of suggestion and half-meaning and pausing and doubling-back. She can get more life onto a page than most can in twenty.

All the stories are named after places, but they don’t necessarily take place there. The title story puts two friends on a tube train in London, travelling the full length of the Piccadilly line in hot pursuit of a pair of lost glasses. Erewhon is set in the backwards nowhere of night thoughts, flipping gender roles to give the man a sleepless night next to a snoring partner, full of worry and rage over the easy, entitled route to success his wife has had. Arizona is set on an acupuncturist’s table, but the desert state is life after menopause; ‘full of dependable sunshine’. Simpson uses these places for more than physical backdrop. It is a process of internal geography, an Ordinance Survey of ageing.

There’s a keen political edge too. The final story in the collection is much bigger than anything that has come before, in both its length and its subject. Berlin follows a group of retirees on an Opera package holiday. Seven nights of Wagner gives Simpson the space to explore history and culture in a personal, exact way. The music starts, there’s a loosening of thoughts, and we’re away: tracing the difficulty of relationships, dealing with change, and how good it feels to be surrounded by people who are just slightly older and more decrepit than you are. Everything is gathered up together. The talk at the interval is of pension plans, but the thoughts during the performance are of the sliding layers of history between two people. It’s an exceptional collection of stories.