The Playroom

by Frances Fyfield

Katherine beamed and Mary softened, watching her sister flop into a cane chair, shrug off the little black jacket which Mary craved, grab the menu card.

  ‘What about pastries? I’m paying today, anything you like. Oh, Lord, look at the price of this stuff,’ all remarks which Mary welcomed as the Katherine she knew.

  ‘No,’ she said kindly, ‘we’ll go Dutch. And we’ll just have croissants. Tell me the news.’

  As if she did not know. Same news as last week. Katherine would have been to work in her chichi shop, kept her rigorous fitness routine, gone to lunch with friends and bought something new, which Mary could have told in advance from the sight of the bag on the floor. All over in two sentences. Then Mary would recite hers in more detail, a life of duty. Went to committee meetings for Oxfam, Mencap, some offshoot of the Royal Society for the Protection of Children, discussed fund-raising for buses for the handicapped over coffee and cakes far inferior to these, received phone calls, wrote letters in three offices, scattered information with great precision, studied reports for the improvement of facilities here and there, and was paid a modest stipend for being regarded as an authority. Mary worked assiduously for a charity information service, was a professional trustee for charitable funds, a self-styled and now indispensable expert on who did what, and the scourge of many; all of which made Katherine very bored. Also, Mary’s determined visiting of her own mother-in-law, a badly kept secret, irritated her with its possessive overtones. Before she had learned to keep silent, little sister had been known to call big sister a bloody Girl Guide. Now she listened politely. Always easier to pretend to listen.

  ‘Honestly, people are so inefficient, Katherine, you’ve no idea. Why don’t you come and help? You need to do something useful.’

  The words came out the same every time and every time Katherine demurred. It was always so condescending, as if she had nothing to do. ‘I might like company,’ she had tried to explain, ‘but I don’t like people as a whole, not your way, never.’ And I should not criticize my sister in the married state, Mary thought: a vast improvement on what had gone on before. But Katherine was not listening. She often stopped listening. Mary sighed. Nothing different in this either. Kath had always been a dreamer, forever escaping the worst, so easily read it was like taking down a favourite book.

  ‘Mary,’ said Katherine, as if embarking on a theme of vast importance, ‘do you remember those pyjama things we had when we were little?’

  ‘When?’ Mary was puzzled by a question which was so out of the blue she was taken completely by surprise.

  ‘You know. We must have been, what? About four, no, me four, you ten, or so. That first school place. Where we woke up, in those flannelette pyjama things. Sort of tough flannelette, plain colours, not very comfortable for bed. Would’ve been better for playing in. You remember?’

  ‘No.’ But she did remember. Always presumed and hoped Katherine did not. Her hand froze on the teacup, startled by the memory. Herself and Katherine, removed from the dark coal cellar of a house where either by accident or design, their parents had left them, door shut on blackness, and simply moved on. Mary had sometimes wanted the history of whatever drug-induced traumas had brought this about, decided against it. She would not have been helped by knowing how she and Katherine came to be fainting with the effort of screaming; once seeing light, waking up in another place swathed in carbolic and that harsh cotton. She remembered, and firmly suppressed the memory. In one fell moment of clarity, Mary could see in some weird kind of perspective why she herself had adopted her life of charitable causes while Katherine had gone hell for leather after a life of comfort. But that perspective drifted by like a swift shadow; so much had intervened since. Mary believed past was past; not something ever to be used or discussed to excuse the present. She felt so strongly about the sheer wastefulness of such thoughts, she would have liked to deny Katherine’s recollections altogether, dismiss them as fantasy, but could not go quite as far as that, even after years of telling Katherine not to think.

  ‘Why on earth do you want to know about those beastly cotton pyjamas?’

  Katherine, too, was staring into the far distance of memory, shook herself and laughed.

  ‘Seems silly, but I just thought of them. Jeanetta has this thing about pyjamas. Boys’ pyjamas.’

  ‘She’s got a lot in common with her mother, then,’ Mary interrupted rudely, made sharp by the shock of the images Katherine had brought to mind. Katherine’s face was unperturbed.

  ‘. . . So, I was just wondering where I could get something of the kind. To play in, not to sleep in. Cord ties round the middle you see, they’re always baggy, might be able to get some to fit the waist without her tripping over the feet. She has to have something roomy which doesn’t restrict her and she hates track suits. How ever will she lose weight if she can’t move? And she seems to have run out of clothes all of a sudden. You know, the same way light bulbs all seem to go at once.’

  Well that was fine if that was all it was. Mary enjoyed a practical problem, felt slightly bitchy for having been frightened.

  ‘You could go to Oxfam. Or one of those other charity shops. They have them even in the West End, you know. You wouldn’t even need to get on a bus. Or,’ she continued, warming to her theme, ‘you could go to a very trendy kiddies’ shop, of which I’m sure you’ll know several, and buy a rather fetching Chinese outfit, you know, those sort of trousers and jackets Chinese children wear in pictures with Chairman Mao in the background. Look very practical to me, as long as you don’t buy them in silk and don’t bind her feet to go with it.’ She laughed at the thought; fat Jeanetta Allendale in oriental multicolours with trotters below. Katherine looked interested.

  ‘Oxfam?’ she queried.

  ‘Katherine, you must know about Oxfam. Don’t pretend you don’t. There were years when you lived out of Oxfam shops, when you were a student. You cut down all their clothes and very clever you were too, looked terrific. You only got your half-baked diploma on the basis of a project called how to make something out of nothing.’

  Katherine’s turn to shudder. She could remember the musty smell of those things, sweaty and rancid with poverty, herself fishing amongst the rails for a colour, reaching alongside equally smelly, horribly poor old ladies who had revolted her. ‘Yes, I know. But I can’t recall anything for children. And I’m not going back there, ever.’ This was said with savagery and Mary was alarmed to see Katherine’s fingers were white. The croissant she had been breaking was reduced to messy flakes spilling over the side of the plate.

  ‘Course not, why do you never know when I’m kidding you, silly creature. What on earth’s the problem anyway? David’ll buy Jeanetta’s wardrobe surely? He buys yours.’

  The face Katherine turned on her was so bleak, Mary’s heart came towards her mouth for the second time in the afternoon, recognizing that familiar blankness, irritating and frightening in equal parts as it had always been. ‘Buck up, Katherine,’ she said briskly. ‘Leave it all to good old David.’

  ‘I can’t,’ said Katherine softly, and then with a voice emerging like a hiccup, ‘David doesn’t think that Jeanetta’s his baby, you see. He really thinks Jeanetta came into me from someone else.’

  The crumbs on the white cloth were so far spread they looked like confetti round the plate. Mary sat very still, picturing the confetti of Katherine’s wedding, the dearth of relatives just as well bearing in mind the slight bulge to the front of the cream dress the bride had worn in preference to white. You aren’t qualified to wear white, not by anyone’s standards, her sister had shouted. Christ, you are so lucky to have found a champion all-pedigree male like David who loves you to pieces, but don’t wear white. Even if you’re going to shine with virtue from now on, and not go bouncing from bed to bed because you simply can’t stand an evening alone, about as self-sufficient as a new-born puppy, nuzzling to anything, doing anything including swinging from the chandeliers in one mad scrabble to be touched. Even after David had arrived on scen
e, the knight in white armour, besotted with the very fair maiden, you couldn’t bloody stop. Katherine had slept with David on the first night; Mary remembered the sounds through the wall despite her own hands in her ears. But then Katherine rarely paused for thought in these matters, her life one long collision course. Mary had been the one who collected up the pieces. Sometimes the men moved on to Mary’s bed, finding it less congenial but more predictable, but she could hardly tell Katherine that. Including the last man before the quest for Katherine’s husband was finally over. Her brow cleared. All alarums ceased. She picked up her coffee cup.

  ‘Katherine, that is absolute nonsense.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Katherine, visibly regretting the gulp of words, shuffling for departure and hiding behind a bending to one side of the table with a curtain of hair shielding her face. ‘Yes it is.’ Repeating Mary’s words loudly, extremely angry with herself. How many times had she vowed not to tell anything to Mary, never again to admit any weakness and let her get her foot back in. ‘Absolute nonsense.’ It had taken years to break Mary’s hold on her life: she wasn’t going to regress now. And Mary was not coming near their house until that golden hair had grown, so there. They could do without Mary, so there.

  She straightened up, picked up her cup. The other hand carefully plucked the flakes of pastry from the table and put them back on the plate, one by one.

  CHAPTER 5

  Absolutely bloody extraordinary, is all I can say, the whole bloody thing. Halfway through the afternoon I remembered one or two things, shot out of work early, watching their faces glad to see me go. I built my career; now it runs by itself. Snap, snap, snap all day, the result of a headache and the eyes I couldn’t find on the pillow this morning. (Ha, ha, they were there somewhere.) Tried to do some shopping and found I couldn’t. Such a bloody bore, but the evening after was rather jolly, or not jolly, at least, not jolly really, but jolly interesting. Better than shopping anyhow like a silly housewife, but then, most things are.

  A great sort of evening in fact, for a slightly nosy neighbour like me. I caught her, you see, Katherine Allendale, cantering up the street on her way to collect the kids, armed with bags of shopping (now there’s a woman who loves to shop: a tour round their house is like an expedition through furniture boutiques in Europe). Wee Katherine tends to make off a bit sharpish if she collects the kids, but I wasn’t going to let her get away even if I had failed to bite the bullet the evening before. ‘Aha!’ I said to her. ‘There you are. Come in for a drink.’ She looked at me as if I was giving her an order.

  Not that she’s the drinking type, our Mrs Allendale, but she’s such a princess. She sat on a stool in the kitchen looking like an umpire at Wimbledon and though I’ve always felt older and wiser, with her perched there, all of us drinking our tea, I only felt older. She does have that effect on me.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘been shopping?’

  As if I needed to ask; she’s always been shopping, but this had the makings of a very subtle ploy to lead in to a remark about how pricey clothes were these days, even for children, a gambit suggested by the label on the jacket she had thrown over a chair, but she beat me to it.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes I have been shopping as a matter of fact. I bought presents.’

  She pushed along the table to Mrs H a box of ultraexpensive chocs, something she does quite often, very shyly but not predictably. Very sweet of her but it doesn’t half show me up and I take a grim satisfaction in the knowledge that Mrs H only likes cheap chocs anyway. Then dear Katherine steals my thunder yet again.

  ‘I’m really terribly sorry about Jeanetta borrowing Mark’s pyjamas. We’ve been so busy recently, I only noticed this morning how low she was on clothes. So I managed to get some and she’ll be round tomorrow in a new wardrobe, won’t you, Jeanetta darling?’

  Jeanetta darling, I noticed with a start, had an awful haircut like a convict and didn’t seem to care about new clothes. My God, what had they done to her? She was edging towards the pantry, a move I gather she uses often at going-home time, both to suggest that a little grub wouldn’t go amiss and secondly as a place to hide behind the door in the hope she’ll be forgotten. I hear screams as often as not when Jeanetta goes home, frightful screams, the spoiled little blighter, but in this instance, the reluctance was silent and the expression on Mrs Harrison’s back as she bent to pick up some toy which had nearly broken her neck, was eloquent. But then the relief of the news was temporary, because just at that moment, sweet little Jeremy, rocking in his high chair, began to totter dangerously.

  ‘Christ!’ I yelled. ‘Catch him!’

  The chair caught against the edge of the table and went down in slow motion, toppling him out in a gentle enough fashion from less than half the table’s height, but still delivering him to the floor with a pretty decisive crack. We are all in a state of paralysis, the way one is, Mrs Harrison halfway off her knees at the time, sinking back on them before making for him at a fast crawl. I leapt up and bashed my hip on the table while blundering in the same direction. Jeanetta shot from the pantry like a bullet from a gun and got there first, humped him into a sitting position rather clumsily but effectively, and put her arms round him. ‘Don’t be silly, Jemmy,’ she instructed rather loudly, slightly rough but tremendously gentle, and he stopped crying at once, like a tap turned off, even though I could see the symptoms of a lovely bump in the middle of his forehead. By that time we were all around him with oohs and aahs and who’s a brave boy then, that sort of thing. Mrs Harrison picked him up: I picked up the chair, dusted us down and the whole set was reassembled, Mrs Harrison clucking a bit about how on earth could that happen, was the leg of the chair loose or something? Jeanetta sidled back towards the pantry.

  It was only then I noticed how Katherine hadn’t moved at all, not a muscle. Quite amazing. Sat there, just as she was while we all flapped. Looked at him as if he’d just said something unfortunate and it served him right. Odder still, he never looked towards her, as if expecting rescue from that quarter least of all. I might not know much about the nauseating details of motherhood, but I tell you, I was perplexed. She might not be the brain of Britain, but I always thought she was competent.

  ‘Yes,’ Katherine said, smiling at us all as we went back to the tea mugs. ‘Yes . . . I managed to do a bit of shopping on the way home. Things are so expensive these days, aren’t they?’ There wasn’t a lot I could add apart from two sentences in vague agreement. ‘Humpty Dumpy sat on a wall, Humpy Dumpy humpy,’ Samantha intoned, quite unable to remember what came next but realizing it was apposite. I was a bit shaken, bloody glad when the whole entourage left.

  But there was more of course, from two sources. Back down to the kitchen to congratulate Mrs H on a timely hint and I found her looking triumphant. ‘Those clothes, Mrs Pearson,’ she hissed. ‘That stuff for Jeanetta. You’ll never guess where she got them.’

  ‘Where she got the clothes?’ I questioned, stupidly.

  ‘Well,’ said Mrs Harrison, settling down to make a story of it. ‘Well, this afternoon I took the girls out for a walk, left the boys with Harrison, and on the way back, we decided to go up the market.’ (I love the way she makes it sound as if the four-year-olds took a vote and the whole decision was democratic.) ‘. . . Anyway, we cut through the back, down that grotty end of Church Street where all the winos go, where they have the really cheap stalls, and there she was. Mrs Allendale, I ask you. Buying kiddies’ clothes at a stall, not only on the market but on that end of the market, all stolen goods down there, dirt cheap and probably fallen off the back of a lorry. Only others go there are the Pakis and blacks buying things at fifty pence top whack until a bobby comes along and they all close up shop. Honest, Mrs Pearson, I’d never buy anything there, so why should she? You don’t know where it’s been.’

  She leant forward like a plotter. ‘And you know what? I think I saw her put something in her bag. Without paying.’

  To tell the truth, I was more amused than shocked. T
he funniest things shock Mrs Harrison, and while I was quite delighted to have a piece of insight into my dear neighbour, I can’t pretend it changed my opinion of her, and I couldn’t see why Mrs Harrison found it so exciting to discover Katherine Allendale with her domestic knickers down. I didn’t believe for a minute that Katherine had pinched something from a stall: there’s just no need. Mrs Harrison would have picked this up from the front page of her horrible newspaper, you know the sort of headline, ‘Duchess found shoplifting’, and translated it to fit someone nearer home because I’ve heard her tell so many of these transposed stories before. Everything’s always happened to someone she knows and half her relatives are dying of cancer or mugging. What tickled me about Mrs Harrison’s shock horror revelations was the notion of our Katy stepping over the rotting cabbage leaves in filthy Church Street market while wearing those marvellous Italian shoes.

  ‘Well,’ I say to Mrs Harrison, failing to give the story of theft the benefit of any comment, ‘she can shop where she wants, of course, nice to know someone economizes.’ Couldn’t let her know I really was surprised.

  Gossip does make for a good mood, I can’t help it, so when Sebastian came home at a semi-decent hour, we actually had a conversation. God alone knows, this is rare enough, since we don’t usually get beyond the point of him saying, ‘Anything to eat?’ and me saying, ‘Get it yourself.’ But I must have been influenced by the Allendale mould, so grudgingly helped him cobble together steak and something out of the freezer, all the food showing signs of carelessness and age. Then I told him about Mark’s pyjamas, and to my amazement, he was actually interested, but then it did have some faint bearing on his son and heir, which usually sparks a modicum of awareness. He loves his children with a passion, even at one remove, far better acquainted with all the minutiae of their lives than I am. Poor Sebastian, he fell to musing. Probably considering the Allendale family tree because of the mention of Jeanetta in Mark’s pyjamas and getting them married off already. My husband is such a careful man, he could plan himself to death, but whatever the reason, he was thinking about the neighbours.