by Mavis Cheek
The only room that Mrs Green approves of is the front room, which is all light and bright and Swedish wood and fabrics, with a rug on its polished floor that comes up to your ankles. If Mrs Green only knew what had taken place upon that rug from time to time then she need make her prurient bedroom investigations no more. As a fly on the wall (heaven preserve Celia and Alex) she would, undoubtedly, have been so sated that their cutlery drawers could overflow with the best-quality Sheffield and it would no longer matter. For this room is the parental sanctuary. This room contains the adult’s television, the video, the hi-fi, the John Makepeace occasional table, the precious things, and it is out of bounds to the children. This is where sometimes, after the guests have gone and the French carriage clock strikes one a.m., Celia and Alex might put aside their brandy glasses, slide on to the rug and make love in the lamplight with the dark silence of Bedford Park streets shut out by the Swedish cotton curtains.
There has been some altercation between them about this, since the last time that Alex put aside his brandy glass, threw off his Jaegar jacket and slid his eager body to the floor, Celia declined to follow suit, on the grounds that Dirty Harry had rubbed a sore spot on her labia – what they call between them her honeypot – and she did not feel up to it. Alex clearly did and had gone very noisily to fill the dishwasher after that and was not only seen to be but, if the cracked crystal glass and the sound of dropping cutlery was anything to go by, was heard to be extremely put out about this. A very strongly sexed man, Alex, and growing even keener in his forties. And he liked Celia to be keen too – though not, of course, as keen as he. Before they were married he welcomed her overt responses which matched (and, unless she was careful, surpassed) his. After marriage and children he expected her to settle down sexually, which she did, finding the idea of wild romps far too energetic, especially with the wakeful Rebecca around. Sex became for her a way of relaxing, a healing piece of therapy through love – to be savoured gently and slowly – and sometimes it happened that way spontaneously. But in the main Alex was a gutsy lover, a hurdling humper, and it would have done his ego no good at all if Celia told him that she found the best sex was when it sent her peacefully off to sleep. He enjoyed the idea of being sexually tireless and privately thought that it was this that gave him his edge in professional matters. Supremely confident in the bedroom, Alex is also supremely confident everywhere else. Torn between the desire for his wife to be sexually rampant and yet seemly, he has opted for the latter as desirable. The mother of his children should need to be encouraged towards excess. Celia understands this and she lets him encourage her. Her relaxed and passive approach to their coitus is both irritating and proper. He treats her like some half-shy flower, with the rider that she should make the first move occasionally. Inside it makes her giggle as she goes through this performance for him and watches the pleased look of the master light up his face as she smiles at him provocatively. There is no doubt in Celia’s mind that their sex life is quite satisfactory, though in the years immediately after his fortieth birthday Alex’s requirement seemed to increase: almost, Celia thinks, as if he had something to prove. It was during this phase that the condom thing was introduced. But this has settled down again just recently, which is not surprising. Alex works very, very hard nowadays. This is the time in a man’s life when his career is peaking (there are enough role-models around in Bedford Park for her to recognise this) and she is not unduly worried about the change in his conjugal habits. With a little provocation she can soon turn him on again. And she will.
Well, anyway – none of this signifies tonight. Dirty Harry is tucked well to the back of her knickers and Tampax drawer, out of sight and memory of Alex, she hopes, and – though Celia knows nothing of it – much to Mrs Green’s chagrin. Her honeypot is in good order and there is absolutely no danger of her period suddenly arriving. Not like recently when they took a naughty Easter weekend in Boulogne and the little beast manifested itself as soon as their feet touched foreign soil. The cramps had been so acute that she actually snarled at Alex when he suggested that despite her little problem they might circumvent penetration and go for external delights.
No, no. Tonight would be a good one in all the departments of her life. She scoops a little of the mayonnaise on to her finger and tastes it: absolutely perfect – she knew it would be. It might take effort but it is worth it. Celia could never give in to Isabel’s trick of using shop-bought stuff. Well may Isabel perch her plump bottom on Celia’s table and wag her finger at her and say that nobody could really tell the difference, and if they could, well, so what? Life was about more important things, wasn’t it, like job satisfaction? (With that penetrating look that always attended Isabel’s broaching the subject ...) Celia forbore – again – to say, ‘exactly – and this is my job,’ as it did not seem diplomatic. Anyway, her guests on her birthday would be served the genuine article. Besides, no one in Bedford Park serves even the best-quality manufactured mayonnaise. But of course Isabel lives in Surbiton, which might be less than half an hour’s drive away but is light years away in style. They certainly do things differently there.
The last time she and Alex had gone to Isabel’s for dinner, they had been strolling around the garden with their beer or wine (the only drinks on offer) and dodging in and out of climbing frames, swings and other boyish detritus (Surbiton gardens, having been constructed without the benign precision of Bedford Park, were large enough both for strolling and for providing space for such child-orientated equipment) when Celia’s brother-in-law, Dave, came bounding through the french doors of what was both the dining room and his office, in hot pursuit of their dog. Looking both agonised and amused at the same time he declared that Brillo, their mongrel bitch, had removed (chuckle, chuckle) a chunk of pâté from one of the plates. An anxious Isabel had rushed back indoors to deal with the disaster while Celia had felt helpless and sorry for her. The other pair of Surbitonites strolling with them had just found the whole thing funny and said that their dog did that sort of thing all the time.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Isabel, returning much restored and apparently quite unflustered. ‘I had a spare tin anyway. And I’ve washed the plates. Naughty Brillo. Down girl, down!’
And as if pâté out of a tin was not bad enough, the next course contained shop-bought mayonnaise with the potato salad. Celia saw that Alex had also noticed this by the very faint wrinkling of his nose. Later his full-blown compliments to the cook were edged with an irony that only she could perceive. Her sister simply took the compliments as her due. She was, Celia had to say it, a remarkably insensitive woman.
Isabel was five years older than Celia. Dark also, and pretty, but with a lot of grey in her hair now which she neither disguised with a simple tint, nor with blonde streaks such as Celia thought would look best. Certainly she would never play around with peacock-blue highlights. Once Celia had bought her sister a surprise birthday treat of a trip to Adrian’s salon for a cut ‘n’ colour. Isabel came back looking much the same, having refused more than a trim, and to Celia’s mild reproof that she should have entered into the spirit of the thing, had said that, frankly, she found the present a bit of an imposition, which put Celia firmly back into the silly younger sister state all over again. Adrian said that the criticism was pretty thick since Isabel had insisted he turned his music down while she was there. He had not done so, of course. One of the few who had ever stood up to Isabel and won. Isabel’s husband never did, but he was a happy-go-lucky soul – a sociology student from Essex turned plumber – and one who did help his neighbours out professionally without charging them. He also voted Labour – a hangover from his Essex days when he had been in the forefront of the sit-ins and the walk-outs – and was the nearest thing to a liberated male that Celia came close to. She liked him and felt in sympathy with his subordinate marital role. Isabel was more than a match for both of them, so neither of them took her on. Alex found Dave’s simple integrity annoying, feeling that no one with any brains could re
ally still vote Labour in this day and age. Dave just smiled if Alex attempted to provoke him, and sipped his beer and said ‘each to his own’ or similar. Isabel had never been interested in politics, though she voted Liberal and spoke sardonically about supporters of any other party. She deprecated herself for reading the Daily Mail, but continued to read it, and told Celia in no uncertain terms that she, too, should read a newspaper of some sort if she was not going to stagnate as a housewife.
‘I’m a mother,’ Celia had, for the umpteenth time, risked replying. ‘I didn’t stop work to be a housewife.’
‘Well – you spend enough time being one,’ her sister countered, curling her lip.
It was only afterwards that Celia thought she should have said that you couldn’t, really, consider the Daily Mail a newspaper.
So often in exchanges with her sister she found it was only after the event that she found the words to hit back. They were forever locked into the superior/inferior sibling game. Isabel would have to be peeled off the ceiling if Celia tried to criticise her. Life was easier if she conformed to what the past forty years had made law between them. Fleetingly she wondered why on earth she had invited them tonight, but the answer was simple. They were family, bonded deeper than any despite such things. How could Celia celebrate this special birthday without her sister at her side?
She would place Dave next to Hazel to whom all politics were irrelevant and have him well away from Alex, who always found it difficult not to bait him. Isabel could also sit next to Alex: he would be prepared to resist mentioning the Daily Mail, just as he had resisted refusing the tinned pâté, because Isabel did, at least, vote Liberal, which showed some degree of good sense. Also, since Isabel was a deputy headmistress (state secondary) Alex held her in some esteem intellectually. That was something solved anyway.
Popping a sprig of tarragon into the bowl, Celia covers it with cling-film and puts it in the refrigerator. No one, she thinks, will guess what the subtle flavour permeating the mayonnaise is, and I will have to tell them. It is my own invention and I am proud of the idea. So says Celia to herself, letting the happily satisfactory thought remove the somewhat sour mental taste left to her after considering the best way to deal with the vagaries of personality she would surround herself with tonight. And then a sniff at her shoulder, coupled with the chink of two empty mugs at her elbow, brings her back to the present and the duty of the coffee break with Mrs Green.
A curious ritual this, in which her cleaner seats herself at the heavy carved table within view of the kitchen while Celia prepares the drinks and carries them in. Quite how this role reversal came about is a mystery but it serves to satisfy Mrs Green’s honour in some obscure way and to salve any wisps of conscience that Celia might feel at employing someone old enough to be her mother to do her dirty work.
Sighing, since she would have loved to start on the veal, she begins the ceremony – filling the Bedford Park mug for herself, and the thin china with pink roses for Mrs Green. She makes instant coffee. Personally she hates the stuff but Mrs Green cannot abide ‘that ground muck’ so Celia buys Nescafé especially for these occasions. Normally she only uses coffee beans and – fairly unusual even by Bedford Park standards – she will not tolerate tea bags either. This, like the individualism of her furniture, gives Celia an extra-special style. She likes that. So does Alex. Whenever, for any reason, he finds the jar of instant in the kitchen cupboard, he picks it up as squeamishly as if it were a live toad and sets it down, pursing his lips as if to say it lowers the tone. Celia doesn’t mind this. We all have our quirks, she thinks. Hers, she knows, is lavatory paper. There is nothing so vulgar as the coloured variety – except perhaps the coloured and patterned type. Celia always buys white. Mrs Green considers that this lacks imagination.
She is just about to turn off the radio when she recognises a record by Manfred Mann – a hit when she first went out with Alex. Manfred Mann. Such a distinguished, university kind of group it had been after all those raw Liverpudlians. Who had said that? Alex or her? She couldn’t remember now. But she could remember red lightbulbs and a room full of students swaying in the smoky atmosphere. His fellow students, that enviable breed on grants while she was already a working girl. She has that fleeting sense of loss that always comes when nostalgia prods. Where has all that hope and zest and innocence gone? Innocence? She smirks as she stirs in the milk. Innocence? Hardly. And yet it had been in a way. She had walked through her teens, full-bloodedly open to sex, an apple-fancier abroad in an orchard, a happy scrumper. Privately she always thought this was why she found monogamy so easy now, for she had certainly eaten her fill in those few years pre-Alex. Not that she ever told him that – she wasn’t ashamed of it but she thought he would probably be ashamed of it on her behalf. He was very moral, really, was Alex. It hadn’t been long before he had guided her out of that heedless world of the young Labour movement (which pinched wholesale from the Young Communist League so far as free love was concerned) and into the more thinking realms of his own beliefs. First had come the Proms, to take the place of pop music. She had loved that. Beethoven’s Seventh in the Albert Hall had taken her breath away: he said that it would. And later, their first holiday together had been in the Soviet Union, which trip compounded all his views on the errors inherent in communism and had left her without a leg to stand on so far as her own commitment to socialism was concerned. To her weak suggestion that the British Road to Socialism, courtesy of Palme Dutt, was what she upheld and was altogether of a different kidney, he had merely come out with a string of loving ridicule in that monstrously chandeliered hotel room in Leningrad, and squeezed her breasts, and called her his little red. And that, in the end, was that.
‘Doo Wha Diddy Diddy Dum Diddy Doo –’ (could it really have been considered more arcane than Freddy and the Dreamers?) she hums, and takes the coffee to the waiting Mrs Green whose nasal excitement increases alarmingly as she draws near. Oh well, she thinks, I have the whole day ahead in which to do my cookery, I can spare these few minutes with her now.
‘Thanks,’ says Mrs Green with a nod of her head which would not disgrace a duchess.
She takes a box of matches and a packet of cigarettes out of her cardigan pocket and, having shaken them like a conjuror might, sets them down on the table. Celia steels herself. She gave up two weeks ago, much against her will since she only smoked one or two in a day, or perhaps more than that at parties. She never smoked in front of the children and it always caused her endless agony if Rebecca suddenly came into the room at eleven o’clock at night just as she was taking a light from someone at the table. Once she had actually burnt someone’s knee in her effort to hide the offending item. On the whole it is easier to have done with the thing, though it seems unfair to give up such a sporadic and adult pleasure. Mrs Green knows all about this so she savours every single suck after lighting up, prolonging the procedure and letting the smoke out with excessive rapture: she’d give her two full sets of cutlery all right.
She blows smoke around ecstatically before saying, ‘Get any nice presents?’ Such a question is like rubbing salt into a raw wound.
‘I got a new car from Alex,’ says Celia, watching the smoke curl upwards, more interested in this than the subject.
‘Another one?’
‘He traded in the Renault. It was six years old ...’
Mrs Green takes an enormous gulp of smoke and puffs it around as if trying to exterminate Celia.
‘Course we’ve never had a car. Never been able to afford one. Not that I can drive anyway –’ Her tone implies that the next stop for women who can is whoredom.
‘But of course you could learn. It is such a liberation. A real freedom. Go where you please. Leave when you like ...’ Too late, Celia realises the fatuity of this. Liberation never got anywhere near the Mrs Greens of this world. Nor ever would, it seemed. They didn’t want it and it wasn’t being offered. The perfect stalemate of immovable objects. ‘Perhaps a bicycle?’ says Celia faintly, hat
ing herself for even further stupidity.
‘Not with my legs, dear,’ says Mrs Green with satisfaction.
At least she has her legs, thinks Celia, for these are a great solace to the lady who uses them as a decisive factor in any losing argument.
‘Of course not …’
There is a pause as Mrs Green smokes on.
Suddenly Celia begins, ‘Mrs Green – would you mind if I asked you for a –’ Her eyes are already on the cigarette packet, her mouth dry with longing. Mrs Green knows this and triumph lights her pale eyes. And then – like a miracle – the telephone rings. Celia experiences a religious moment of gratitude as she leaps up to answer it. Mrs Green experiences quite the reverse. Twice blessed, Celia considers herself, for she has not only avoided temptation but she has also got a reason for leaving the table and her cleaner’s mordant conversation with honour.
