The Playroom

by Frances Fyfield

  ‘Knew a chap once,’ began my own Sebastian, who knows a lot of chaps, ‘. . . who knew Allendale’s father.’

  ‘You never told me.’ He looked at me strangely, as if to underline the fact that I’d never asked.

  ‘You never tell me anything interesting.’

  He shrugged, resigned to my constant criticism. Resigned, I supposed, to my shrugging him away in the early hours of the morning when he feels affectionate. I had a sudden vision of them next door, into their ritual eating by now, while we chewed manfully and I drank the whole bottle of wine.

  ‘He had an empire, Allendale Senior. Floated on the stock exchange. Then went in for shady dealing, looted the firm, went bankrupt and lost everything. David must have been a boy. Good family, went to ruin.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Don’t know the details.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, why not?’

  ‘Only gossip. Papa Allendale went to prison, but David rose from the ashes, made a small fortune for himself, you know. Became an architect while playing the stock exchange. Acquired a chain of shops and sold them at vast profit. He doesn’t really need to work now, but he does.’ He was still thinking of Mark’s marital prospects. ‘Very sound, David,’ he added.

  ‘Not like his father, then?’

  ‘Oh, no, not at all. Do you really need another glass of wine, dear?’

  ‘Don’t be so stuffy and mind your own business.’ He was silent, knows not to argue.

  ‘I think I’ll go to bed.’

  ‘Suit yourself.’

  I don’t really want him to go on, you see: having finished that bit, Sebastian will want to talk, about children, about work and I really can’t be bothered to listen. Think I’ll just take a quick gin in the study since clearly old face-ache is not going to broach another bottle of wine. Just a little nightcap, add a dash of tonic . . . Oh, Sebastian can be a bore. Truth is, though, only admitted to alter ego, I’ve always rather fancied nice David Allendale, and all this information really fired me up. Rolled him up in my estimation, if you see what I mean. Always did like a fighter, not a man of mere patient endurance like Sebastian. Yes, quite a fighter with a background like that; I can’t imagine what it must be like to lose all your money and have to start again in the teeth of a daddy in clink. Wow. It all made me like him so much better. Solid, gentle, brave chap, no wonder he has to be so organized. With a bit of a, you know, dicky wife.

  Sorry, Katherine, I shouldn’t even have thought that. Ha, ha, ha: people might say the same thing about me.

  Of course they wouldn’t. Would they?

  CHAPTER 6

  One of those evenings defined by a sense of hopelessness. Even the minor thought of meeting at dinner people whom she actually liked did nothing to relieve a feeling of resignation, mixed with a sensation of panic, like a child waiting for a slap from teacher. She had looked a fool in the boutique, let herself down with Mary and shown next door she could not even control her own children. The triumph Katherine had felt in buying Jeanetta’s clothes evaporated when she approached her own house and imagined emptiness inside, acknowledged in one single instinct of alarm as soon as she tried the door. The paint surrounding the lock was scuffed and her key refused to work. On the sixth attempt the key bent, and in an awareness blunted by the knowledge of being late, in possession of a guilty parcel, and also of being very tired, she realized she must have the wrong key. A key to another house entirely, perhaps. Katherine looked at it in perplexity, the same key as yesterday which refused to work today, licked the metal, tried again in the clear knowledge the endeavour was hopeless. She considered going back to Mrs Harrison, decided not, for the shame of it; imagined the doorbell beneath her finger sounding into emptiness as she had known it would, and the usual feeling of panic assailed the back of her neck, moving her mind forward like the button on a tape machine into a dreadful scenario for the evening ahead. A space of hours in which she stood with the snivelling children on her own doorstep, marooned by being unable to move, smiling at the guests due to arrive for drinks within an hour as preamble to the barbecue at Monica’s. Four of them to be disgorged from cars only to be told I do not have the wherewithal to refresh you, but would you like to sit down on the step: My husband has left me.

  The fact of David being somehow delayed, traffic-jammed at the tail-end of an appointment, injured somehow, or simply failing to watch the time, did not occur to her, especially the last, with the other possibilities too remote for consideration. Perhaps she could take the children and sit in the car but the car was not visible, parked each day in a different place, and she could not begin to look inside her bag for another key. It would not be there, and he had gone, left, fled the nest: the house beyond the door would never again contain him; she would be on her own, penniless, explaining his absence as yet another but easily the greatest of all her failures.

  Jeanetta’s screams had ceased when faced with the inevitability of entering home for the indignity of bed, the same way her voice ceased when the audience was clearly preoccupied. The whinging which replaced the howling stopped too as soon as Jeremy’s began, the one voice dying away on the rising cadence of the other like a duo without harmony. Jeanetta flumped on the doorstep, looking at Jeremy in silent perplexity as he screamed Dada, Dada, the most used of his small repertoire of words, pulling his mother’s skirt with one, none too clean hand, while Katherine herself felt a similar, childish scream rise in her own throat. Not for Dada, only for David; where was he, in this whole city, other than here? But as the scream died stillborn with Jeremy’s commencement of the second stanza, the door opened and there he was, Papa to them all, dishevelled and slightly puzzled by the row. In one moment, there was a unison of smiles. David moved forward and took Jeremy deftly into his arms.

  ‘What on earth are you all doing out here?’

  Everything was subsumed in relief. ‘The door was locked,’ she said.

  ‘Of course it was. Like always, I mean when isn’t it locked? The new lock, since two days ago. The old one broke, remember?’

  She pushed the hair out of her eyes, instinctively aware of the rearrangement caused by bending and twisting, speaking physical persuasion to the key, coaxing it to work with the whole of herself. ‘I don’t remember. You’ve let me in before. Yesterday and the day before . . .’

  ‘As I would have done today if only you’d rung the bell, silly.’ The grin with the words was pure affection.

  She thought she had, pictured her finger on the bell, relief still making her smile. Don’t argue now. Jeremy and David beamed at the world below them from their enormous height, the child at head level with his father, the way he liked. ‘Don’t just stand there, you sillies,’ said David, addressing Katherine and Jeanetta, who drooped like a fat tulip, turning her sideways grin at him as if the angle increased the chance of attention. ‘You live here. Come in.’ Katherine compressed the market carrier bags more firmly inside the boutique bag, lifted both and stepped over the entrance. She was home. It was the home she had searched for all her life. Without it she knew she would wither and die, but lately, it seemed vulnerable.

  John Mills turned the lock on the outer door and went upstairs, home at last, but without any sense of relief, always amazed that the first key would work on a door so warped and disfigured by graffiti and thumps. He had lived here for more years than he could remember, watching the scenery shift around him with indifference to anything but the establishment of the takeaway food shop on the ground floor. He had not even resented the presence of the bus stop and the traffic lights near the living-room window which meant that he could find himself eating a meal in the full gaze of thirty top-deck passengers sitting at the same height as himself and taking in every detail of his diet as well as the kitchen beyond. A room with a view, he had joked, pointing to the clinic for sexually transmitted diseases, no longer approached with discretion and clearly revealed when a double-decker bus was not obscuring either its frontage or the employment agency above. T
here might have been splendour to the left and right of the Edgware Road, but no prosperity had spread to this particular patch, which remained shaken by traffic, stirred by change in a way which was not the same as improvement. Beginning London life in this flat simply because there was nothing else to be had, he stayed here now out of obstinacy. To move away would be weakening in the face of the capitalism of his landlord.

  Gurjat Singh had managed, by dint of various manipulations and a friend in the planning department, to install down below a distant relative on a short lease, whose cooking might shift the upstairs partnership while turning in a profit at the same time. When John opened the downstairs door, the early-warning smells of onion and spices, never quite definable as left from yesterday or begun today, hit his nostrils with force, diminishing only slightly as he trod up the battered linoleum stairs to the second door, where another fumble with keys gave entry. The number of keys was impressive and represented a large investment in locks, a barrier against the landlord on the one hand and the several episodes of burglary on the other, although in his worst persecution mould, John did not consider the two enemies entirely unconnected. No self-respecting burglar would deign to enter here, since the height, the smell, the stairs and the ultimate rewards would be scarcely worthwhile. The burglars did not listen.

  He opened the door to the flat in three manoeuvres, one for the Yale lock, two for the bolts top and bottom, both placed slightly too close to the frame and therefore skinning his knuckles each time. On the third turn of the key, he could hear Kat yowling beyond, scratching away at the last of the paint. Kat was a once off. He or she was called Kat on account of a rapacious appetite for Kit-e-kat, nothing else but. Not Whiskas, remains from tasty human meals, steamed fish or any other morsel, only Kit-e-kat, fresh from the tin or three days old, didn’t matter. Kat liked only the scent of this particular food, fungus and all. ‘Just like the takeaway meals,’ grumbled Matilda Mills. Don’t be silly, said John, aware how much she disliked Kat, not for being what Kat was, but simply for being symptomatic of a failed life in a demoralized house.

  Even before they had discovered the secret to her health, they had christened the wizened thing Kat with a K because she resembled no real cat, especially not a fat cat, inherited as an aggressive, half-starved kitten with a short tail and a look of malevolence towards humankind. Matilda’s choice, subject of an argument which she won as part of many concessions, but abandoned soon after when Kat, with uncanny feline instinct, aimed all her attentions towards the one in the household who had not chosen her, but was burdened with the greater conscience, namely John. Half-wild Kat would not respond to Matilda’s advances: she sensed instead the crippling compassion of the man of the house, who had not wanted her at all, laid her catlike bets on him rather than fuss and attention. Kat’s premonitions were sound; Matilda could have kicked the animal downstairs after three weeks in a flat so unsuitable for such an inhabitant. So could John, but being himself and unlike Matilda, did not, and saved ugly Kat from those who would. He had twice climbed on to the roof to rescue Kat terrified by intruders, and whilst not exactly loving her in any sense he recognized, was stuck with her.

  Mrs Matilda Mills felt roughly the same way about John. Stuck with him, roughened by pity and disappointment while desperately looking for an excuse to leave.

  Of that fact, John was dimly and hopelessly aware, but put it to the back of his mind. Matilda, with whom he had once shared politics and pop concerts, but could not provide now with whatever it was she wanted, was late again. Never mind: there was always Kat. John scrubbed at the surface of the enamel sink and felt Kat weaving in and out of his legs. He remembered seeing an immaculate Persian version sitting in the window of the house he passed most days, the one where he spoke to the old lady, what was her name, Harrison. ‘Now you wouldn’t do that, would you?’ he said to his own poorer specimen. ‘You wouldn’t sit yourself in the window behaving like someone’s potted plant, would you? Course you wouldn’t.’ Strange to think how devastated he had been when Kat had gone missing over the rooftops. He looked down. Her movements were frenetic and the bowl of food was untouched. ‘Now what on earth’s the matter with you? Mad at the mention of some other beauty, are we?’

  She scratched at the floor, turned in circles, then skittered towards the wooden box in the corner of the kitchen in which he stored old newspapers and any periodical which supported his point of view. Then she strode back, circled his legs twice more, turned her head upwards, miaowing in the fashion of extreme hunger, a series of beseeching yells straight from the chest, repeated as she wove back towards the box, arching her back with her tail straight in the air. John looked at her exposed behind turned to him in fury, wondered quite inconsequentially if they had ever determined Kat’s sex or simply assumed she was a She. Then in a dawn of amazement he could see Kat’s rear end was heaving, and in one more turn through his legs, felt the bulge of her flanks and realized everything at once. Bending to touch her, swearing at his own blindness, he was consumed with anxiety. She was yowling and squirming as he felt her sharp nipples, withdrew his fingers with haste and clapped a hand to his forehead.

  ‘Oh, poor Kat,’ he murmured. ‘How can you bear such ignorant people as owners? Here, here, here . . .’ He squatted by the wooden box, picking out papers and throwing them on to the floor, rocked back for a moment, perplexed. The wooden box would not do: the sides were too high for Kat to come and go with ease. Wild by now, he rushed back to the kitchen, found a shallow cardboard container, piled newspaper into it followed by three clean dusters. Kat watched and interrupted, her movements and noises a constant protest, but as soon as the nest was prepared, she jumped in and scratched around, then lay on one side, stretched with her abdomen moving violently.

  ‘There, there,’ John crooned. ‘Is that a good place for kittens then? Oh Kat, I am sorry, I should have seen. Bit of milk, shall we? No?’ She did not want milk. When he left her to fetch it she raised her head in anxiety, howling after him and starting to scramble out in order to follow. She wants me, John thought in wonder: she wants me standing by and stroking her head like any woman in labour; how absolutely, enthrallingly, unbelievably marvellous.

  A fluffy kitten twisted and turned on the still warm paving stones of Monica Neill’s patio. The kitten lay on its back, pale underbelly exposed, paws at right angles, the upper half still and lower end wriggling. Katherine watched, fascinated by the sheer abandonment of the pose, secretly slightly shocked. The patio was full of people and she was dreadfully concerned that someone might step on the thing and squash that naked underbelly. She shuddered and nudged the kitten very gently with her foot, reluctant to touch but wanting it to move, hearing in her mind the snap of the frail backbone.

  ‘Oh kitten, you idiot brute. No bloody shame at all.’ Monica put down the carafe of wine she was holding, scooped the kitten into her arms and blew into its face. She handled the animal with affectionate ease: having kissed the pink nose, she threw kitten off the patio on to the lawn. There was nothing savage in this hurling from waist height, the legs of the kitten unfolding to land within three feet, but the movement staggered Katherine. She recoiled slightly from Monica, who had recovered the wine carafe in the same stoop as abandoning the cat. Katherine envied that bossiness while finding it irritating. ‘Stupid puss,’ Monica shouted after it fondly, then turned to Katherine, waving the wine. ‘More wine, Katy, come on, do. Last orders before food. Don’t you like cats? I would have thought you would.’

  ‘Yes I do,’ Katherine smiled, gritting her teeth on ‘Katy’, which she hated. ‘David doesn’t though.’

  ‘Katherine, that’s nonsense. I don’t mind them at all,’ David interrupted, laying an arm around her shoulders.

  ‘David puts pellets down in the garden to poison next door’s cat,’ Katherine continued. The hand round her shoulder moved: she felt her ear pinched hard and looked at him in surprise. Monica barked with laughter.

  ‘That’s not true at all,’ David
said, joining in the laughter. ‘Katherine puts down pellets to preserve her precious flowers, and the stuff isn’t poison: just drives off felines, the smell or something. I like cats. That one’s particularly beautiful, but they are difficult to keep. Katherine wouldn’t like the mess.’

  She twisted out of his arms, shrugging him off crossly, looking sulky. I bet she wouldn’t like the mess, Monica thought, warming more than usual to David’s vivid smile and noticing the fur on her own cotton skirt, absent from Katherine’s pristine slacks. Monica was not disposed to be critical of her guests or question any of their remarks since she was so pleased to see them standing on the floodlit patio (soon to become a conservatory if only David and Colin could agree how). David would do a good job because he had the right kind of hands. She liked David’s hands and the sight of them distracted her from the surprise on Katherine’s face. They were strong brown hands with the stubby fingers of a craftsman. By comparison, Katherine’s hands were very long and pale, pointing at the cat which had resumed its exercise on the grass. Look at me, I’m so pretty. They might both have used the same words.

  ‘Well,’ said Monica, winking at David in some sort of understanding, ‘if you want a cat, you can have one. We’ve three spare. Inside there,’ she gestured towards the house, ‘there is a mother cat still in disgrace. She’s a thoroughbred something or other, cost a fortune, so I put her on the pill.’

  Katherine laughed. ‘Oh no, not really . . .’

  ‘So what does pussy do?’ Monica demanded, turning her attention to David, who had not heard the story before. ‘She spits out the pills and goes off frolicking with some mangy tabby, comes back pregnant. So we now have three surplus kittens, like that one, all more or less housetrained, no pedigree at all.’ She turned back to Katherine. ‘What do you think?’