The Life Situation

by Rosemary Friedman

  Praise for Rosemary Friedman

  ‘Delightful and easily read’ – Weekly Scotsman

  ‘Writes well about human beings’ – Books and Bookmen

  ‘Accomplished, zestful and invigorating’ – TLS

  ‘A funny and perceptive book’ – Cosmopolitan

  ‘A confident, sensitive and marvellously satisfying novel’ – The Times

  ‘A classic of its kind’ – The Standard

  ‘Readers will find it as affecting as it is intelligent’ – Financial Times

  ‘Adroitly and amusingly handled’ – Daily Telegraph

  ‘An entertaining read’ – Financial Times

  ‘Highly recommended for the sheer pleasure it gives’ – Literary Review

  ‘Observant and well composed’ – TLS

  ‘A pleasing comedy of manners’ – Sunday Telegraph

  ‘What a story, what a storyteller!’ – Daily Mail

  I’ve travelled the world twice over,

  Met the famous: saints and sinners,

  Poets and artists, kings and queens,

  Old stars and hopeful beginners,

  I’ve been where no-one’s been before,

  Learned secrets from writers and cooks

  All with one library ticket

  To the wonderful world of books.

  © JANICE JAMES

  Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point.

  PASCAL

  Contents

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  PART ONE

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  INTERLUDE

  Nine

  Ten

  PART TWO

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  About the Author

  By The Same Author Also On Ebook By Arcadia Books

  Copyright

  PART ONE

  One

  There are moments in time which, if we are quick enough to catch them, and sufficiently sensitive, we are able to recognize as turning points in our lives. Oscar John’s arrived together with the cheese a few days after his forty-fifth birthday, while dining with the Ashley Beaumonts in their handsome Nash house.

  The cheese board in itself was worthy of comment. It was not a board at all but a circular marble platter, in the French manner, through the centre of which was a gilt handle. The weight of the dish was at least seven pounds: a fact worthy of comment and commented upon it was as each guest, summoning up all the strength at his disposal, struggled to pass the wretched thing to his neighbour. This was not all. Laura Beaumont, prompted, one presumed, by her somewhat bizarre sense of humour, had impaled each cheese, fetched fresh and personally that morning from Jackson’s of Piccadilly, with a paper flag such as were common on sandwiches at children’s parties in the days when children had sandwiches at parties. The Pont l’Evêque proclaimed itself ‘egg and tomato’; the Gorgonzola, ‘sardine’, and the Brie, creamily flowing towards, but stopping just short of, the marble, ‘anchovy paste’.

  Oscar John, who dined frequently with Laura and Ashley, knew this small ploy was standard procedure and no longer thought it particularly funny. From the other guests came one chortle, one smile cynical, one bemused indication that the penny had not in fact dropped and one total lack of response as the cheese board and all that sailed on her were rejected with a tiny shake of a red head, whereupon Beaumont took it upon himself to pronounce loud and clear:

  “Women who do not like cheese are frigid!”

  He went on to state that that was not to say that all frigid women did not like cheese. And then to explain, to anyone who cared to listen, that this form of reasoning in which from two given or assumed propositions, called the premises and having a common term, a third is deduced, called the conclusion, from which the middle term is absent. It was while he continued to expound upon the finer points of the syllogism, a form of deductive reasoning about which Oscar had no intention of crossing swords with his host, whose whole life was spent playing upon words, that his eyes met those of the unfortunate woman who had refused the cheese and released the torrent of verbosity in which Beaumont now wallowed happily.

  Why, following this provocative and potentially offensive remark, had she immediately looked at him? Why, as if expecting the communication, as one anxiously awaits a telephone call, had he immediately responded?

  Thus are life’s moments captured, her paths altered. Afterwards he could never say I remember your eyes were blue as cornflowers, pea-green, tiger-yellow, amber-brown. He did not, at that point in time, remember even her name, although there had of course been introductions. He knew she was a doctor with a husband who was in ink. He was not quite sure if this was another of Laura’s little jokes. She selected her guests as carefully as a fashion-motivated woman her outfit, but did she really believe that ‘ink’ went with ‘writer’? She was too intelligent; but then again, that humorous streak. In any event it was not with ink, but with ink’s wife that the rapport was established, tenuous as the not quite visible threads of the spider’s web but minute by minute capturing the moment securely and centrally in an intricate pattern of inevitability.

  He looked immediately and guiltily at Karen who was helping herself to the Brie (anchovy paste), then to ‘ink’, whom Beaumont had by the eye and, warming to his theme, informed that because all women who came from a certain part of the Soviet Union had red hair, one was by no means to assume that all women with red hair came from that certain part, nor indeed from the Soviet Union at all.

  Contact having been made and any furthering of the unspoken interest liable to be intercepted at any moment by the other guests, Oscar, aware of a thrill of excitement in the region of his loins, made a half turn in order to receive the cheese from the lady on his left who had already taken a generous wedge of Gorgonzola. The red head opposite, slightly lowered, was directed at her empty, green Provençal plate.

  “You have embarrassed Marie-Céleste,” Laura said, addressing her husband.

  “I?” He looked genuinely puzzled. So lost had he become in his own flow of words that he had completely forgotten the original remark from which they sprung.

  “The cheese,” Laura said.

  He thought for a moment, then removed the napkin he had tucked into the top of his waistcoat and laughed his great belly laugh.

  “You are not offended are you, my dear?” he asked, and before she had a chance to reply, “Marie-Céleste is not offended. Besides, it was only a joke!”

  “There is no such thing as a joke,” Arnold Katz said from Laura’s right hand. What he actually said was “Zere iss no such sing as a yoke.” In any event it was the first remark he had volunteered throughout the entire meal.

  Beaumont either pretended not to understand, or decided to ignore, the implications of the comment; Oscar could not be quite sure. In any event he said:

  “With all due respect Katz, balls! Have you heard the one about the chap who lost his way in the desert…”

  Oscar had, and allowed his mind to wander while keeping his face towards his host with what he hoped was an expression of keen interest.

  He and Karen had an ambivalent attitude towards their dinners with the Ashley Beaumonts. He had first met Beaumont some years ago when they found themselves side by side at a literary luncheon. Beaumont, knowing his wife’s proclivity for celebrities, had been delighted to make the acquaintance of a well-known novelist; while Oscar had bee
n thrilled to meet, in the very robust flesh, the wielder of the pen responsible for the city page of his daily newspaper, whose turn of phrase never failed to make him groan and to whose warped sense of humour he had often longed to give a mortal form. What manner of man greeted Woolworth’s interim with ‘A case of the woolliewobbles!’? Had the gall to announce that tarmac was sticky? Had come up over the years with such gems as ‘Dent in steel’; ‘Fizz goes out of soft drinks’; ‘Uplift for British bras’; ‘Oils slip’; ‘Coffee stronger’; ‘Rubber elastic’; ‘Newspapers dull’…

  “I am, of course,” Beaumont had explained at the lunch, “a novelist manqué, which is why I would willingly throw myself at your illustrious feet.” When Oscar modestly demurred he silenced him saying, “My dear chap I mean it. Greater love for the English language hath no man. Unhappily I have no gift of narrative, no ear for dialogue; a certain felicity with words only and an interest in the city which attributes I was able to put to their greatest advantage by marrying a newspaper.” He went on to explain that Laura’s father, an eminent and wealthy peer of the realm, had on his marriage handed him the city page with the promise that on his demise he would inherit the newspaper itself. It was a happy arrangement. Beaumont at the time, although acceptably schooled, degreed and descended, had not discovered the square hole willing and capable of accepting his odd-shaped peg and old Hetherington, old even then, was beginning to despair of finding a suitable and permanent liaison for his iron-willed and only daughter. For Beaumont, able at last to indulge his talents, the work was not arduous and the rewards great. Laura had discovered a head to her table, gregarious, acceptable and witty to a fault; the old man, now indeed attached to life by the merest thread, a son-in-law in whose hands the future of the newspaper would be assured. He had arranged at various intervals over the years for Beaumont to receive a title as befitted his son-in-law, only to be defied with such odious utterances as ‘Knight refuses to fall’ or ‘Knight-in-gale with father-in-law’. He was not able to explain, even to Laura, why he refused an accolade, but knew only that in some way it might set him apart from the very people who were the lifeblood of his ready wit. He would far rather, he confided to Oscar on that first occasion, have been the author of one published novel than editor of a thousand city pages and a million ghastly puns. He recognized, however, that fate had destined him to play the clown and like all clowns he must wear his baggy pants to the end while trying to stop the tears disturbing his greasepaint.

  From the time of their meeting their friendship was established and they were separated only by their lifestyles.

  Laura and Ashley, having married comparatively late, found themselves caught between two modi vivendi. Belonging both to the ‘Nanny, Harrods, grouse and coarse fishing generation’, they were not absolutely sure how to cope with a teenage son who did not own a pair of socks and carried a handbag and a daughter who did not own a handbag and refused to set foot inside Harrods. They were partly reassured by the fact that they were not alone in their predicament, but did not feel entirely comfortable with the fact that Vanessa’s boyfriends not only did not address her father as ‘Sir’ but moved not a muscle when he entered the room, even if they did happen to be sitting, or more likely lying, in his favourite chair. Tristan’s girls were mostly beautiful and had, he assured them, beautiful thoughts; Laura would have preferred them slightly more clean. Their parents were relieved when, on dinner party nights, they elected not to appear.

  Not all that far from the Outer Circle of Regent’s Park with its stuccoed terraces and classical archways Oscar and Karen lived in a many storeyed, equally terraced house in that part of Primrose Hill which by a whisper made NW3. There all similarity ended.

  The house was not large; only tall, two rooms to a floor. On the ground floor, to which they had elevated the kitchen when they moved in, was also the sitting-room. On the first floor the main bedroom, which one day Karen assured them all she was going to get round to making ‘best’, and Oscar’s study. Upstairs belonged to Rosy and Daisy, who took advantage of the fact that nobody much liked climbing the stairs to see what was going on to make as much mess as they liked. On the lower ground they had gutted the lot to make what they called ‘basement’, which was in turn playroom, jumble reception area, unfinished do-it-yourself furniture repository or super party room when everything was heaved out, shab disguised with smoochy red light bulbs and a hundred people could intermingle comfortably.

  On the night of the Beaumont dinner which was to set the tolerably straight line on the graph of Oscar’s life wobbling uncertainly, he had come into the bedroom to find Karen staring trance-like into her wardrobe, and flopped down hands behind his head on the bed.

  “What time have we been asked for?”

  “7.30 for 8.”

  “Game for six players.”

  “Eight more likely. Laura usually has eight.”

  “Hand-picked, not thrown together higgledly-piggledly. I wonder if Laura has ever been higgledly-piggledly?”

  “Doubt it. People like that never are. Bet her wardrobe has never looked like this.” Karen examined it with distaste.

  “Bet everything’s in plastic bags and even her bedroom slippers are on trees.” She took out black culottes that needed a button and put them back. “Honest to God I don’t know how they managed it. No higgle and no piggle.”

  “If we had all those servants…”

  “Rubbish. If I had all the servants in the world my last pair of tights would be laddered and the wrong shade and your drawer would be full of odd socks. The world is divided into Beaumonts and Johns. Those who see gynaecologists and dentists every six months and those who are filled with good intentions. It’s a question of genes.”

  “Profound. Who will be there?”

  “Usual. A celebrity and partner; beautiful girl and partner; us. If you’re ever going to get ready.”

  “Will it be the pink dinner or the green?”

  “Possibly the pink. Or then again perhaps the green. At any rate there is sure to be something in little pots it has taken hours and hours to make with the rarest of ingredients which tastes as near to the kipper pâté I sling in the blender as makes no difference – hot toast of course…”

  “I’d rather soup. I love the way Laura picks up the cup to finish the last drop and everyone looks at everyone else not quite sure whether to follow suit.”

  “Then again she could be in one of her Middle Eastern moods, all couscous and cracked wheat; pine nuts in everything.”

  “In which case you had better take the Rennies. Before dinner I presume there will be arak or slivovitz according to the menu; it will be served in glasses with twisted stems…”

  “After, sugared almonds and bittermints large as cartwheels, unless it is the Middle Eastern bit when it will be halva or Turkish delight…” She held a chiffon scarf over her nose and wiggled her belly… “full of Eastern promise.”

  “Have you sent flowers?”

  “‘Look forward to seeing you, Oscar and Karen’? No. We can take those cherry liqueurs the Rutleys gave us…”

  “And the Smiths gave the Rutleys and the Johnsons gave the Smiths and the Gor-Blimeys gave the Johnsons. I wonder where they end up eventually?”

  “In the dustbin, white with age, cast there by some lunatic fool enough to open them; or Christmas present for the daily help.”

  “Make sure the Rutleys didn’t put a card in.”

  “Not to worry. Old hand at the game. So are the Rutleys. They might have changed the wrapping; mean sods… It’s a case of long tartan skirt and black sweater – frightfully Jaeger. Prints, with mandarin sleeves prone to trail in the soup, or sexy lurex only slightly tatty in which Laura will make me feel I am not quite a lady.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Yes. In any event I shall feel totally inadequate.”

  “Why Laura should make you feel inadequate! Good God, you could run circles round her. I can really see this new novel as a film, in which cas
e you shall dress at Givenciaga and have a charge account at Fortrods.”

  “What you do not understand,” said Karen, searching through a mound of varicoloured tights, “is that if I had all the money in the world I could not put myself together like Laura. People with far less than I achieve stunning results from M&S with a soupçon of old curtains. Either one has it or one has not. It’s as simple as that.”

  “Is it important?”

  “Yes.”

  “Women!”

  “You pretend not to understand; easier.”

  Rosy and Daisy came in when she was putting on her mascara.

  “We have to collect twenty things in a matchbox for school tomorrow.”

  “All right.”

  “We haven’t got a matchbox.”

  Karen felt her heart sink. “You’ve been home since four o’clock watching the box. I asked you if you had any homework.”

  “It isn’t homework. We’ve just got to collect twenty tiny things in a matchbox.”

  “Look, I can’t produce a matchbox from mid-air. Collect the twenty tiny things and tell them Daddy doesn’t smoke. They should be ashamed of themselves anyway, expecting children to have matchboxes with this lung cancer thing… Ask Daddy.”

  Rosy looked at the bed. “Daddy’s asleep. Some people have gas cookers.”

  “I told you, just collect the twenty tiny things…”

  “We shan’t know what fits.”

  “What do you expect me to do?”

  “Miss Painter will be cross.”

  They stood, dirty, innocent faces waiting for the miracle; staring expectantly at Karen, impotent, mascara rod in mid-air.

  “Perhaps Mrs Hubble will have a matchbox!” she said finally with triumph. “She smokes.”

  “She has a lighter.”

  “Her boyfriend gave it to her.”

  “He’s black!”

  “Look, I’m trying to get ready and we shall be late. Go away and collect the twenty tiny things – you can guess roughly the size of a matchbox – and I’ll ask at the dinner party if anybody has one. Laura is sure to have matches in the house…”