Parlour Games

by Mavis Cheek

  Celia feels faint. She whirls away, turning her back on the voice and the legs, and presents her immense shoulders to the woman at the till, still clutching the items to her upraised breasts. She looks demented. The woman at the till sighs. It is almost closing time and it has been a hard day. She really does not have the time to indulge one more dithering customer.

  ‘Will that be all?’ she says, reaching out her hand for the purchases. It is very odd that at this perfectly straightforward gesture her customer takes on the shifty guise of one caught shoplifting. Celia stands mute and still, apparently frozen to the spot, pressing her purchases to her chest as if to pretend they did not exist.

  The assistant peers askance. Yes, they are definitely there, tucked beneath the customer’s spreadeagled hands. A jar of Vaseline, a packet of party condoms and a packet of ordinaries. Some people have all the fun, thinks the sales assistant bitterly. Her husband is an undertaker’s assistant who takes his job very seriously. Party condoms are not for the likes of him. The only thing she can be sure of is a lovely laying out when the time comes. These thoughts make her peremptory.

  ‘Madam,’ she says, ‘if you please ...’

  She reaches out.

  Celia goes on hugging them to her chest. She can do nothing else.

  Mrs Green feels badly done by, especially now that Celia has turned her back on her. The statement about her legs and her trials of this morning requires eye to eye contact. She moves round to Celia’s front.

  ‘Mrs Crossland ...’ She begins again.

  Celia’s heels wobble dangerously.

  Anyone, anyone at all could have come into the shop and found her making her purchases – yes – even dressed like this – and she would have been able to dissimulate somehow. Another Vicars and Tarts party in Kingston would have done. They would have believed her. Bedford Park people are always attending such witty functions. But Mrs Green! Celia wobbles again, steps forward to right herself, steps back ditto, feels herself sans equilibrium and gives in to stagger frontwards again. And, most unfortunately, the red satin heel discovers, in a perfect bullseye, Mrs Green’s slipperetted foot.

  Mrs Green has used her lungs to full extent once today. Understandably, with her corns, she does so again.

  She lets out a barely translatable cry of, ‘My corns, my corns!’

  Which is fair enough since she has them aplenty.

  She recalls, as she yells, the endless line of shoes in Celia’s wardrobe – soft kid things, the like of which Mrs Green has never, will never, possess.

  She yells afresh. Even as the red satin heel is removed and the throbbing subsides a little she decides not to give up. A dozen pairs, she has counted, if not more. Why stop now?

  Yell, yell, yell, she goes.

  They collect quite a crowd.

  Celia, taking advantage of the diversion, shoves her three items and a five-pound note at the assistant. The assistant, noting that there is now some urgency in her customer’s mien, slows down.

  We all play games. This is one of hers.

  ‘Va-se-line,’ she intones slowly, pushing the till buttons.

  Celia, hunted by the yelling Mrs Green, implores the assistant to go quickly.

  The assistant has few moments of power and slows down even further.

  ‘Aaand Twooo Packeeetttsss of –’ Long pause. ‘Cccc—’

  Oh God. Mrs Green has stopped yelling she is looking with interest at what the assistant rings up. The very idea of Celia buying two of anything silences her towards interest. Celia is sweating again.

  ‘ooonnn,’ says the assistant slowly, rather enjoying it all.

  ‘Cornplasters!’ shrieks Celia.

  And wresting the commodities from the assistant’s grip she smacks Mrs Green’s shoulders manically as if the woman were having a fit of convulsions. Diversionary tactics.

  In the moment of change from till to hand, Celia drags Mrs Green away before the assistant can correct her customer’s mistake. Try putting those on your tootsies, thinks the assistant, and she has her only laugh of the day. But she does not follow Celia and Mrs Green out on to the pavement to apprise them of the error, for the queue at the till is too long.

  Mercifully Celia is left to deal with the situation in her own way but a serious malfunction in her brain area creates a useless void. Her mouth opens and closes but no sounds come out. Mrs Green’s mouth also opens and closes but to better effect.

  ‘Now I’ve lost me place in the queue,’ she says.

  She squints at the unbagged purchases which her employer clutches to her. If she can’t get her embrocation she will at least have a packet of cornplasters.

  ‘I can’t go back in there,’ she says defiantly. ‘It’ll take all night. You’ll have to give me one of yours ...’

  If she cannot have Celia’s cutlery, or her shoes, or even find some hint of sexual activity, she can certainly have one of these.

  Celia’s head is shaking from side to side and her bright-pink mouth is making a series of ‘O’s.

  Mrs Green acts swiftly. She puts out her ancient shaking hand and rips the prettiest of the packets out of Celia’s grasp, which produces a very satisfying squeal where once the random ‘O’s were.

  ‘I will have them,’ she says. And once they are in the deeps of her cardigan pocket she adds sweetly, ‘You can deduct them from my wages.’

  ‘Oh, now look here ...’ Celia manages.

  Mrs Green sniffs long and joyfully. ‘You won’t be needing all them tonight, now, will you?’ She looks down at the raffish red satin. ‘Best thing you can do,’ she says, ‘is to put something decent on your feet instead …’

  And with the sudden alacrity that is hers when she chooses she leaps off into the warm dusky night.

  To laugh? Or to cry?

  Celia is unsure which.

  She takes the remaining package and the Vaseline and stuffs them into her handbag. A less doughty heroine might be stayed by such diversions but not ours. Ours has her resolution intact, perhaps strengthened, by such things. It is all uncharted anyway. What does one extra little loopline matter? She will get there in the end. She is committed to it. At least Mrs Green has left her with the daytime ordinaries. Oddly enough Celia makes no equation between the two purchases stuffed into her handbag. Well – naturally – to a woman of Celia’s maturity Vaseline and condoms are uncharted too. She can always find a household use for the former. It is very good, for instance, for slipping into one’s finger-nails before gardening. As for the latter – she is perfectly well aware of the use she will have for them.

  She puts out of her mind completely the residual drama of Mrs Green’s corns and how they take to the application of Sparkling Nights. Celia feels that she has quite enough to contend with without dwelling on that ...

  (Mr Green, Arthur, to whom nothing more exciting has happened recently than a re-run of Eliot Ness in ‘The Untouchables’, is dragged abruptly from his evening’s stupor by the extraordinary sight of his wife crouching over her bare feet and delicately unwrapping something he feels sure has no place in his home. Mr Green, Arthur, was in the Eighth Army with Monty and Desert Rats never forget the wartime debt they owe to the Dunlop Rubber Company. He recognises what she unwraps all right. And he does the only thing possible in the circumstances. He turns off the television. After which his laughter shakes their modest but cosy walls. It is several minutes before the truth can be imparted to his wife, during which time that good lady makes some remarkably inventive attempts to adapt the item footwise. Yes, on the whole, it is better that Celia does not dwell on such possibilities. She has quite enough to cope with ahead of her – quite enough –)

  Things do go a little more smoothly for Celia after this. She makes a smooth entry into a parking space near the taxi rank, finds a cab instantly, gives the name of the hotel, and is on her way. And, just as she did at the beginning of this story, Celia is looking good. Very good. Only different. More wicked, certainly, but also – it has to be said – a good de
al more mature. The peacock highlight sits very well on her now – and it matches much more than her eyes.

  2

  The Side Saddle is an alien place, so Celia thinks. Not at all like the bright and spacious bar at the Queen’s Brough. She has to squint a little as she stands on its threshold to accustom herself to the low lighting. It is about the size of two Norman Shaw front rooms, no more than that, with ten or twelve round tables set about the panelled walls. To her right is the bar itself, horseshoe-shaped, mahogany-topped, with stools ranged around its curve: most of these are already occupied. To her left are the tables, full of knee-to-knee young men and women all wearing the kind of stylish outfits that make them look like leftovers from forties Hollywood. There are champagne bottles littered about, gin and tonic glasses held in hands whose wrists are weighted down by Rolex watches, and Filofaxes lie pulsing to be opened amid the wet rings on the tabletops. All around the walls are equestrian artefacts: saddles, crops, bridles, and photographs of nameless horses. Of long and dusty duration these. The only aspects of the bar, apart from its polished furnishings and the barman himself who is greying at the temples and as supercilious as only a Mayfair barman can be, to hint at continuity. For the rest it is all to do with Now. No past, no future: just Now.

  As that insensitive brotherhood, the pre-Raphaelites, managed to wipe out the Renaissance by saying that you should see every leaf on every tree and paint soppy eye-upturned knights if you wanted real art – so Celia observes in wonder that these stylish chaps and chapesses before her have done the same with pop music. It is, apparently, a peculiar piece of young upwardly mobile conceit to like only pre-Beatles vintage. And as she stands there the ridiculous plink-plonk notes of Adam Faith’s ‘What Do You Want ...’ goes ‘Wish Yew Want-ed My Luv Baybee.’ And makes her, not surprisingly in her heightened and nervous state, want to laugh. She feels like a granny. Which is, after all, as it should be and which does not, after all, help her to feel better about it. It is especially not the right kind of feeling when you are out to attract a lover. Celia, attempting to ooze desirability, is aware only of creeping incredulity: the eyes, which should be smouldering and slitted, are open wide. What she sees is all rather horrible.

  A noisy group near to the door calls to a young man at the bar. His name is, unsurprisingly, Henry, and he is, apparently, in the chair and being somewhat tardy with the old champers. Celia realises that she stands at the edge of the heart of Yuppiedom – and its twin organ, Extreme Youth. Such Extreme Youth, she thinks, as she gazes about her, that they appear to be Extremely Silly. She watches intently as one young man – rather attractive in a fawn double-breasted jacket with highlights in his hair, removes the shoe from a squabbling girl in Ungaro white linen – who scarcely notices – pours champagne into it and prepares to drink. Celia may see them as Extremely Silly but they do not. As she in her youth did not. They see themselves, if they bother to look at all, as no more nor less than what they are. Enjoyers of Life without need to count the cost. Savaged livers and cholesterol-laden hearts do not, should not, cannot affect them. Celia finds this enviable and it makes her sad. She sees herself standing there as some kind of memento mori – well-preserved they might call her, attractive older woman, with a nudge and a wink and a she-could-teach-you-a-thing-or-two. But not a part of them. Never a part of them again. And the irony is, she thinks, that she couldn’t teach them a thing or two. Physical maturity she has, emotional maturity she has not, nor its sister sexual maturity, come to that. Age brings only experience, she thinks, growing even sadder, not answers. Top Shop and Bedford Park permanent youth seem suddenly both gross and empty. Oh dear, Celia, she says to herself, what are you going to do?

  She cannot participate in this. Yet she cannot go home. She has come on a crusade for Vengeance and unless she is careful it will end up as only another Humiliation. Two Humiliations will finish her. Her plain and daily condoms throb with unconcealed amusement in her handbag. She gazes more fixedly around the bar. Everyone is part of a group. Even the few lone drinkers perched on stools have an at-oneness about them. Whatever their sorrows they are youthful sufferers, in need of youthful comfort. They will certainly not welcome the overtures of a sex-seeking housewife from Chiswick. Or if they do it will be as an experiment. Despite everything Celia does not see why she should submit to the role of guinea pig. Whoever she selects must submit to her requirements and certainly not the other way around. And anyway, Celia does not see herself in the Mrs Robinson role at all. It might be all right in films and books but from where she stands it looks most unappetising. I may not be looking for love, she argues, but I am looking for some kind of equality in this exercise, a little sensitivity, a little understanding: there doesn’t seem to be any chance of finding that here ... And to support this view she brings her gaze back to the youth with the champagne-filled shoe just as he brings it to his lips. She sees him grimace, dash it to the ground and say, in penetrating nasal tones, ‘My God, Camilla, your feet do stink ...’

  Celia looks away. She hears the girl giggle and whoop and shout laughingly that he has simply ruined her shoe. And that is all. No Humiliation for her. She is one of them. If the same thing had happened to Celia she would have died on the spot – or punched him on the nose – or perhaps both. Regretfully she decides that she must leave. There is nothing for her here. Only the barman suggests any potential but he has a cruel mouth, a mouth which is even now curled unpleasantly as he looks across to the group with the shoe. No, no. Not him. No one then. She shakes her head and begins to turn away and thinks to herself that she has been a fool. Much more of a fool than any of these glitzy youngsters whose confidence has just cut her to the bone. Her courage ebbs. As it pulls away from her it begins to reveal the stark truth: that she is not, now, going to be able to go through with this. She will just have to get in a cab and go home and nurse her wounds in secret. Never tell Alex, never feel that warm inner sense of Vengeance achieved. It will just have to be the death-bed memoirs after all. Gloom and despondency creep in to fill courage’s gap. Perhaps the death bed is not so far off anyway ... she certainly feels that she has aged a decade in this five minutes. She watches as a piece of bread sails across the tables and lands – quite perfectly – in a glass. Another piece of bread sails back again to be met by cheers and shrieks of pleasure. A joyful battle has begun. Quite definitely this is no place for her. She turns to leave. The suspender belt pulls uncomfortably, reminding her of her folly. She is about to hitch at it, unliberated monstrosity, when she hears a soft, male, American voice behind her.

  ‘Jee-Suss H. Christ! That is definitely not for me ...’

  She turns fully around and is relieved to see that the comment was not directed at her but at the bar itself. For the eyes of the speaker, half closed with displeasure, are looking beyond her, and the head which houses the eyes is shaking slightly in solemn certainty.

  ‘Will you look at those kids in there ...?’ he says, as much to himself as to Celia. ‘Pitching all the stuff around. Definitely not for me.’

  ‘Nor me either,’ she says, surprised at how easily the phrase trips out.

  ‘These hotel bars,’ he says, still staring beyond her, ‘are the absolute pits.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ she says, preparing to move past him. ‘But that one certainly is ...’

  ‘Where in the world,’ he says, quite sincerely, ‘do you go for a quiet drink before dinner in this place?’

  And Celia, without art or planning, says, ‘That’s just what I was wondering. Excuse me please.’ And she moves on by, the shoulders of her dress making negotiations a little difficult.

  ‘Sorry,’ she says, and smiles apologetically with the same charm she would show on vacating a supermarket check-out.

  When their eyes meet, as eyes will under such circumstances, Celia is genuinely astonished. There is a certain quality about the look in those eyes. A certain quality that leads her to suppose she might – just might – have found an answer ... Can it really be th
is easy? She stares at him as searchingly as she dares. Apparently it can for he is looking back at her, quite relaxed, out of nice blue eyes with crinkled corners. She is not sure if she finds him attractive simply because he is, like the mountains, just there – or whether it is because he is physically attractive anyway. It doesn’t much matter. She is grateful for his existence and she intends, fail or win, to have a go. If those careless young bloods in there think they are Hollywood, this one is much more like the genuine article. Vintage, though. She has to admit that he is more vintage than she might have chosen for he certainly won’t see fifty again. But then, given the backdrop of all that zestful bread-throwing, his mature years seem a positive plus. She takes in as much as she dares without actually stepping back and giving him the once over. He will do. That is the main thing. And as she absorbs a clearer picture of his physicalities she decides that he will more than do – he will do very nicely.

  He exudes stability which, given Celia’s difficulties with her high heels, makes him even more acceptable. And he looks as if he is someone with whom she could converse, at least – gulp – at first ... She moves a little nearer.