Romance Finely Aged: On the Unique Dynamic of Older Couples

Of all the wonderfully apt images in Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, my favorite has to be the one that describes the seventy-four year old Olive and the widower Jack Kennison—lying on Jack’s bed together in the book’s final scene—as “two slices of Swiss cheese pressed together.” It’s such an odd, unappealing, vaguely sweaty picture of two elderly people, and yet it floors me every time I read it because of what comes next: “such holes they brought to this union—what pieces life took out of you.”

Such holes. I love that. As a description of the accumulated difficulty and complication of a life, it seems to me to be so much more accurate than our stale and worn-out notion of “baggage.”

In Olive’s case—rude, outspoken, bossy Olive Kitteridge, a self-confessed “beast of a woman”—the holes are many and various. Above all, there’s the guilt and regret she feels about her long, flawed marriage to her husband, Henry, who has now died; there’s the guilt and regret and exasperated disappointment she feels about her terrible relationship with her grown-up son, Christopher. There’s her fear of loneliness, and her dread of life itself, of having to go on.

And now, suddenly, there’s the recently widowed Jack Kennison with his bald head and his stomach “like a sack of sunflower seeds,” a retired Republican-voting academic she has always despised from afar. But it turns out that Jack, along with “holes” of his own, has a sense of humor, and to her amazement Olive is smitten with longing for his company and an unexpected physical desire, together with enough pragmatism to know that they’ve been drawn together by mutual need: “If this man next to her now was not a man she would have chosen before this time, what did it matter? He most likely wouldn’t have chosen her either.”

It’s a situation that’s freighted with the risk of failure, but neither the holes of the past, nor the uncertainty of the future, will end up persuading Olive she’s doing the wrong thing. With Jack’s heart beating beneath her open hand, it has come to her, in this seventh decade of her life, that “love was not to be tossed away carelessly, as if it were a tart on a platter with others that got passed around again. No, if love was available, one chose it, or didn’t choose it.”

I’ve always been interested in older love in literature—in this late-life choosing and not-choosing. Even as a teenager reading David Copperfield I was more interested in Barkis and Peggotty than I ever was in David and Dora, or David and Agnes; more moved by Barkis’s hopeful patience than anything Dickens’s young hero and his wives had to say to each other. And now that I’m a very long way from being a teenager, what interests me most is fiction that crackles with the jeopardy of two people who have less time in front of them than they have behind them.

What will they do, these people, in these tricky, testing moments? Will they, like Olive, choose love, or will they turn away from it? How will they decide? What impulses, what hard-won knowledge, what foolishness, what courage, what cowardice, what hope, what self-deception, what sacrifices, what accommodations, what “holes” might come into play?

It’s what I’ve been curious to find out in my own novels and short stories: how will things turn out in situations where love is fraught with the particular complications of being older rather than younger?

When a widowed farmer heads west from a small colonial settlement in Pennsylvania on a crazy quest in search of woolly mammoths, will the blacksmith’s widow who is fond of him wait for him to return, or throw in her lot with a traveling salesman (West)?

When a fifty-something London librarian falls for a much younger woman in a former British hill station in India, will he step aside so she can marry a younger man, (The Mission House)? What will happen when an elderly American tourist saves a sixty-something British woman from being killed by an escaped beach umbrella, moments after she’s tried to pay a young man for sex (Sibyl)?

When a middle-aged murderer in a Colorado jail and the Quaker spinster visiting him are drawn to each other, will they pursue the attraction or turn away from it (The Redemption of Galen Pike)? In my new novel Clear, will the late, happy marriage of a penniless Scottish Presbyterian minister and his wife survive after he accepts a job evicting the last resident of a remote island in the middle of the North Sea?

Few writers have unpicked the tangled threads of later-life love as deftly as Alice Munro, and her 1999 short story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” is one I return to again and again. It’s an exquisitely observed tale of a forty-year marriage in which an elderly couple, Grant and Fiona, have settled—in spite of Grant’s past philandering—into an easy-going retirement.

But when Fiona begins to show signs of Alzheimer’s, she goes into a care-home, where she swiftly seems to forget that she has ever been married to Grant, and to develop, instead, a fierce attachment to one of the other residents—a silent, horse-faced man called Aubrey. Grant is shocked, aghast, jealous; briefly he wonders if Fiona is pretending, and if this is her revenge on him for his serial infidelities. But nothing could have prepared him for what happens when Aubrey is suddenly removed from the home by his wife, Marian, leaving Fiona so distraught that all Grant wants is to restore her happiness.

It’s all so delicately calibrated and psychologically nuanced, and what follows is both wholly unexpected and entirely believable: Grant visits Marian and begs her to let him take Aubrey to visit Fiona at the home. When she refuses, Grant—the old philanderer—exploits her obvious attraction to him to persuade her to change her mind. It’s a strategy at once so devious and so generous, so selfish and so selfless, so expedient and so full of love; a strategy whereby Grant resolves to sacrifice his own feelings, and in doing so produces an ending so surprising and so touching it takes your breath away.

It’s these kinds of accommodations that I find so compelling in these stories about older love: the ones that are made by people like Grant and Olive in the evening of their lives; their head-long embrace of love in whatever unexpected or unwished-for form it has arrived; their willingness to cherish and negotiate what’s available, however knocked about it is by the lives that have shaped it.

But what happens when love isn’t chosen? What happens when love, late in life, is no longer available?

It’s hard to think of a more searingly poignant answer than the one Kazuo Ishiguro gives us in his magnificent The Remains of the Day.

The story is told by Stevens, an elderly English butler we first meet in the summer of 1956. The aristocratic owner of Darlington Hall, the great house in Oxfordshire where Stevens has worked for forty years, has died, and the house has a new owner and a much-reduced staff. When a letter arrives out of the blue from its former housekeeper, Miss Kenton, Stevens decides to drive down to the West Country to visit her, telling himself the sole purpose of his trip is to solve Darlington’s staffing problems by asking her if she’d consider returning to her old job.

Slowly though, as Stevens motors towards their meeting, the past begins to unravel, and we learn how he has clung all his life to his misplaced respect for the unworthy Lord Darlington, and to his own rigid belief in the “dignity” of his discreet and subservient role as a butler.

Slowly, we learn that his hide-bound notions of who he ought to be have crippled his ability to be open to the possibility of love, and that twenty years ago, when Miss Kenton left Darlington to get married, he shied away from acknowledging his love for her. Even now, looking back on his life, he is too repressed to admit his dawning understanding of the depth of his mistake.

When he and Miss Kenton finally meet again, they refer to each other as “old friends,” and reminisce about their “close working relationship,” even when it’s heart-crushingly clear they both regret the choices they’ve made. Miss Kenton talks about the grandchild she has to look forward to, Stevens about the “work, work, work” that will keep him busy back at Darlington Hall, until eventually, Miss Kenton confesses openly how much she thinks about the life they might have had together, and Stevens is forced to admit to himself that “at that moment, my heart was breaking.”

It is, I think, the most moving scene I’ve ever read between two older people who love each other. Ishiguro’s writing is beautifully restrained, and it is unbearably sad when Miss Kenton’s bus comes to take her away, back to her husband, and she and Stevens say their goodbyes.

It’s the whole point of the novel, of course—that Stevens is alone at the end, in the rainy gloaming of a small English sea-side town, contemplating the remains of his day.

And yet part of me can’t help wishing that one night, twenty years before—when he’d finished polishing the silver and putting away the port—he’d settled down with a copy of Olive Kitteridge.

Part of me can’t help wishing he’d read the part where Olive places her hand over Jack Kennison’s beating heart, and that, like Olive, he’d chosen love when it was available; that he’d understood, while there was still time, that love was not to be tossed away carelessly, as if it were a tart on a platter with others that got passed around again.

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Clear by Carys Davies is available from Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.