The Playroom

by Frances Fyfield

  ‘I’ll wait,’ said Mary. ‘I’ll help if you like. I’m good at this.’

  ‘No,’ he said violently.

  ‘Well you can make me a cup of tea then and I’ll watch.’ She was mildly surprised when he complied. Not even mere compliance but a fury of fuss with a china teapot, tea left to infuse while lovely Italian china mugs were banged out of a cupboard which he had to unlock. ‘Why lock it?’ she asked, but he smiled the vacant smile of a polite and busy man. ‘Oh, children, you know.’ She imagined she could detect a slightly demonic gleam in his eye and for the moment she was frightened, but only for a moment. Fortified by tea and harmless chat on the subject of spring-cleaning, the brink of autumn, the weather, the removal of beetles from carpets and so forth, all of which he debated with animation. ‘Leaves drift indoors, and we must beware of harvest mice too,’ she finished ironically, determined to keep the upper hand and also to tease him. ‘Anyway, I thought Katherine would have done all this.’ ‘Sometimes,’ he replied vaguely. She took the plunge. There were several things she did not wish to say but felt obliged to say, all of them in private before Katherine came home.

  ‘David. Where’s Jeanetta?’

  ‘Jeanetta?’ His head turned on his neck towards her as if he had difficulty placing the name. ‘Oh, Jeanetta. Staying with her grandmother. For the moment.’

  ‘Sophie?’

  ‘Yes of course.’

  ‘Since when?’ He looked at the table and passed his hands over the steam rising from his mug, at the same time pulling a mat beneath it to protect the table surface. ‘Only yesterday. We had a birthday party, you see.’ Mary felt her shoulders lift in relief; only since yesterday and Sophie this morning had forgotten to say, naughty Sophie. The relief was short-lived: Sophie would have said, even Sophie on the brink of senility would have burst forth with such tidings. Mary held her tongue and sipped her tea.

  ‘Not your favourite child, is she?’ she asked. David’s eyes travelled to the open French windows. Outside on a small patio, Jeremy played with bricks, a study in childish concentration so acute he had neither noticed nor greeted his aunt.

  ‘Jeanetta?’ said David. He seemed unable to speak other than one-word questions, betraying an uncertainty, a man needing a prompt in the corner of his stage. ‘Jeanetta isn’t mine, you know. Katherine’s concern, that child.’ Ah, so that was it, an excuse for a dislike which might have nothing to do with what anyone would call real reasons, such as ugliness, lack of control, all features which Mary’s casual and just occasionally acute perception had only now borne downwind, less the result of direct observation than the sum total of Katherine’s offhand remarks. ‘Don’t be such an absolute bloody fool,’ Mary shouted. ‘Of course she’s yours, you crapulous idiot.’ Then she was quieter. People, even male people, were supposed to be amenable to reason and he was, after all, short on information. She was ready to inform but he went on, ‘She had this blond man, this lover when she met me. She saw him once or twice, you know, after she met me; she told me, she tells me everything. He was there, after we met, I know he was. After she was born, I kept waiting for Jeanetta to go dark, like Jeremy did, so soon, like me, but of course, you know who stayed pale and fat, like an albino. Of course she wasn’t mine. Too ugly. Like a little pig. Blond pig.’

  Mary drew breath slowly and spoke with emphasis, as if speaking to an idiot. ‘Katherine had several lovers, which you must know very well.’ She was extremely precise to keep her temper and control the heat of her face. ‘. . . Including the last, one with the impossible name of Claud, a man inherited by me. In all senses. Claud is a man with a ten-year-old vasectomy if you must know, and you clearly must. He couldn’t have produced a child if he’d tried. And he still tries. Are you listening?’

  ‘Well, well, well.’ He was smiling and this time, she was more than slightly afraid but again the feeling passed. He shrugged and spoke with deliberation. ‘What a slut you are, Mary, must be in the family. Fancy screwing a man who can’t make babies, I shall never understand women. Well, well. Too late now. Nothing to do with us, really, nothing at all. You-know-who was simply disgusting. She had to go. She was . . . Oh I don’t know.’

  Was, was, was. The words registered like hammers, each striking a blow of different magnitude.

  ‘She, you-know-who, Jeanetta, is not disgusting. You pig.’ Mary did not know she was screaming. ‘And anyway, where is she? Not with your mother.’ He did not respond to the scream. ‘Look,’ he said with exaggerated patience, ‘look, I’m having this spring-clean and I’ve got to finish, you’ve got to go. Must clear the mess, can’t stand it, Katherine can’t stand it, such a heap . . .’

  She leapt from the table and slapped him very hard. The combined force of guilt and rising hysteria were behind the slap, so sharp the imprint of her fingers remained on his face like a birthmark. Towering above him she stared down and watched a vague and dreamy look come into his eyes as he put one hand to his flushed cheek. ‘Don’t,’ he said pleadingly, ‘don’t, please.’

  ‘Where is your fucking daughter?’ Mary said, her voice descending to a low hiss, her sharp face thrust into his. His glance drifted beyond her, over the grey sacks by the sink and swivelling round to the French windows and the playroom door. ‘Tell her, Jeremy boy,’ he said. ‘She wants to know.’ The boy, bored at last, staggered through from the garden with a broad smile on his face. He brought for his aunty three of the bricks and a key. On a key-ring, the jangling sound a source of better delight than any rattle. He did not want to let go.

  ‘Show me,’ said Mary.

  CHAPTER 22

  I thought I was good at sums. Another joke. As it happens I have been quite incapable of the most simple factual additions. So I think now. Tuesday night, prelude to a slow and uneventful Wednesday morning, was one of the first when I have retired to bed with only a modicum of alcohol aboard and I was not entirely sure I liked the result. Not with dear Sebastian, I mean: that was nice and waking up to find him, my feelings as uncertain as they are, is at least a qualified delight. Sometimes it is better not to think and taking refuge in the depressed jumble which weighs on post-alcoholic dawns might be preferable to the sharper focus of sobriety. At least when suffering from an overdose one never thought of anyone else; there was no room. But I woke today with other worries, a sort of indigestion from everything I had seen.

  We should not have gone to the damned dinner party, would not have gone except for the guilt created by an invitation sent so long in advance and the knowledge of a small gathering where we would be missed: I have not quite lost my manners yet and some of them are returning. Then there was Mark, of course, insisting he would be all right because he wanted a break from his parents for the privilege of watching TV later than they would allow, with the Harrisons. And Sebastian saying we ought, you know. Me fishing out a dress, such a novelty going anywhere with a husband and remembering how often I had refused in the past, grateful for the chance to redress and determined not to overdo the drink. I had not told Sebastian all about Katherine and our distrust: not about the necklace, for instance. There was a portcullis over my tongue which stayed down all evening and after we came home. So that two things haunted me well into today’s sober dawn. Not her being sick like that, revolting though it was: I don’t know why, horrific without being too surprising, but the necklace she wore, as solid a piece of gold as ever I saw, so why the hell did she need mine? Oh I know a thief is not selective on the basis of need, but why, when she could never wear the damn thing with one already. Unless of course, she took mine to sell. A gold collar like a prize slave-girl: poor Katherine: I found it in me to pity her even before she vomited all that lovely food. But more insistent than that, I was haunted by the scraping at the door, the funny sound which seemed to trigger the explosion, scraping and scratching by kittens. In that house, temple of cleanliness and germ free, with baby Jeremy allergic and her always trying to poison our cats? Impossible to believe whatever he said: they would never spend good money on
kittens and I’ve never known any cat make a noise like that. I said as much to Sebastian and he said they probably kept monkeys. Without elaborating, he seems to have changed his favourable opinion of David Allendale. Never mind, said my spouse: none of our business. I wondered: remembered all those clothes outside and felt another chill in my bones. I don’t often confide in Mrs Harrison, but I told her about the party because she asked and I couldn’t just say everything was fine. Hearing about the hysteria, she simply stared and shuffled, then burst forth, ‘We was so worried, Mrs P, we got the NSPCC round to them . . .’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘We was worried about Jeanetta,’ she said defensively. ‘I did tell you.’ ‘Yes,’ I said shamefacedly, ‘you did. But the NSPCC . . . Really! Did they go?’ Her face was full of relief but she did not want to elaborate: the whole episode was obviously hideously embarrassing as far as she was concerned. ‘So I gather,’ she mumbled. ‘I spoke to Mrs Al’dale’s sister: a man went about it. Nothing wrong. Anyway, Jeanetta’s with her granny, so it was all a false alarm.’ I let it go at that, all of it festering in the same chill.

  Oh well, Samantha’s turn for treats today, to mollify the jealousy (this child is so like her mother), which is now extreme. She went out with her father alone for a heavy-duty tea, leaving Mark and I alone with the Junior Scrabble, him with the leg irritating like a scratch. Not exactly a treat for him, but I’m ashamed to say, one for me since so novel is this spending time with them, I’m still enthralled by it and I hope the feeling passes after a while or I might never go back to work. So clever this boy at games, he could almost let me win, but as if the distractions in my mind were infectious, he could not concentrate either. The Allendales were still percolating on the brain and I could not persuade them to take a graceful exit. When the dog scraped at the door to join us in the study, I jumped. Thought of trivial, unconnected things. Mark spelled out THIEF with triumph. Memory does strange things, but I had forgotten his sleepy confessions.

  ‘Mark, you remember telling me about the strange man, and Sammy saying he’d come back when you were away with Daddy?’ He nodded. ‘I shouldn’t . . .’ he began. ‘Course you should, darling. Don’t worry, I know all about it, but if he came last week, when was it he came the first time?’ He saw no contradictions in these statements of my knowledge, frowned in an effort to remember.

  ‘Oh, ages and ages. I know, yes I know. Jus’ before Jeanetta and Jemmy stopped coming and stayed at home, then. I think. He came in when Mr Harry and me was watching the cricket and Mr Harry was telling me about cricket. Did you know, Mummy, a cricket ball can break your head?’ ‘The vagrant man, darling,’ I reminded, picking up my Scrabble pieces. ‘Oh yes. We chased him out, Mr Harry and me. He got in upstairs, then Mr Harry heard him moving about so we chased him out. I wasn’t scared ’cos I’d seen him before anyway. With you, out of the window, and another time.’ His voice went down to whispering level. ‘Mr Harry thought he took something. He was worried, but the man hadn’t done nothing. Sammy says when he came back, he wanted to get in.’

  I am beyond anger these days, or that would have been uppermost in my mind, might have been, had I been more interested in control of my house than I was currently in the Allendales’. I had always known, after all, that the honesty of Mrs Harrison is selective. A simple connection of memory hastened by the ever present picture of Katherine with gold collar. An intruder in our house, not confessed to me, on or about the day that bloody necklace went adrift. Oh, poor Katherine: I could have misjudged so much more than I thought.

  ‘Daddy’ll be home soon,’ I said smoothly. (Nice, actually, to be able to say that.) ‘Then I’ll go next door and see if Jeanetta’s back. She might come in and play with you.’ And I make some kind of peace with her mother, I did not add. Mark’s face lit up. ‘You could go now,’ he suggested helpfully. In the eyes of an almost eight-year-old, adult company cannot compete with another child, even a far younger child. I laughed at him. ‘All right. Mr Harrison will come up. Don’t get into mischief.’ ‘I can’t move,’ he sighed.

  Neither could I, or at least not with any speed. I have ever been reluctant to enter the perfect portals of next door, because they put me to shame and my reaction to shame has always been resentment. In daylight or darkness, I do not like that house despite admiration, which is not the same thing. Which is why I paused to put lipstick on mouth and comb hair before leaving: sometimes these boosters have an effect, not always and not really today. So sunny and warm this street, an Indian summer now, merged with the last of the proper season, the trees shedding first and giving the only hint of future darkness. Mark says he can never believe it will get dark again, why should it, and I tend to agree. I still did not want to go and knock next door; even when I had made up my mind and got out into the road, I walked slowly like a sightseer. I went up the steps to their door; rehearsing a few words about thanking them for dinner and found as I raised a hand to the bell, that the door was just open. Oh good, that would break any ice: I could joke about our vagrants (there was a new one hanging around in the street) and warn them to be more careful. Hate it when the door is on the latch like that: one never knows what to do. You can’t push it open and go in unless you know the family well and otherwise you simply wait like a lemon or shout. I was trying to decide but I did not have the chance.

  Screams, screams, more screams, emanating from the womb of that building, cutting round the door from the dark hole of the hallway and into my ears like knives. Katherine’s screams, I thought: I had been imagining screams in my head for almost twenty-four hours, hated the reverberation which would not leave me alone, paralysed me all over again. You cannot analyse screams, say on first hearing if they are anger, terror, fear, but they must always be fear, there is little else which matters in a scream. My God, these were endless and I was a coward. Mind your own business: you owe nothing: simply her pregnant nerves, their affair not yours. And then, it could be murder, might not be safe to go in there, you fool, you have children of your own and you want to live. Standing on the doorstep, looking round for help and seeing none: children in there too. You would kill a person who left one of yours in a house with screams like that. And you owe Katherine: she might be hurt: she’s having a baby, she’s fallen: go in, go in, you ghastly, drunken coward. Into the kitchen, following the path of the sound, so easy, no mistaking, first room off the hall, you were there not long ago. More screams in disharmony with the rest: a child, that boy Jeremy screaming with his mother. I ran the last few steps.

  At first I thought it must have been murder, a fight of massive proportions, the pristine kitchen I had sat in and admired through their window a heap of junk, bags, bits everywhere, everything in comparative chaos, not the place of entertainment I had known. After this impression of violence, the next thing I registered was the howling face of the boy, standing by the French window unattended, his face red with shrieking, holding a blue brick in one hand, frightened. I looked for Katherine, the source of the barking screams so different from those of the boy, saw what I took to be her until I realized in the same split second it was not, struggling with David in the door of the playroom. Sunlight streamed through, blurring his features, making her, this woman, a silhouette merged with his: they were not so much struggling as holding on to each other, he preventing either of them moving, pushing her back away from the opening. Her face was turned to the sun: the struggle seemed absurd but still she screamed. They did not notice me and he pushed her clear of the door, saying something, his voice guttural with panic. The next thought of mine was relief: no one hurt yet, no blood, me interfering; nothing but noise: an argument and a terrified child, but then on a peculiar instinct less brave than curious, I slipped between the distracted adults and into the sunny alcove where the children played: their room, blinded by sunlight, seeking out each corner.

  Such colours in there, such hideous, hideous mess. Clothes and dismembered toys, little teddy bear legs, broken cars and torn posters, but mos
tly clothes, shiny fabric, a large expanse of vivid purple cloth. Beyond that, a cloud of pale-blonde hair, obscenely coloured against the material, a half of a face visible and one small hand with huge knuckles. From the other end of the purple cloth there stuck a thin calf with a foot simply and pathetically adorned with one white sock. She did not move.

  It was then they noticed me, the adults, or it may have been then he slapped her to stop the screaming, not a flick of the fingers this time, a slap. I knew by then she was not Katherine but I did not care, whoever she was did not matter. She appeared to subside in the brief glance I gave her, looking to David for some sort of explanation. But he shouted, was all: my eyes, still adjusting to the contrast of light and dark, only noticed a contortion of his face into a shout of furious warning, one fist clenched towards me, the other holding her. Only the threat went home, the danger. I turned back, instinct again, stopped, bent down, tucked the purple round the child on the floor, scooped her up and ran. Not running as I scarcely know how to run: running like Sammy did when she learned to walk, a drunken stagger, ungainly, effective, determined. Crashing through the front door into the street, up to our door, pressing the bell with my chin, the limbs of the thing I was carrying flapping round my waist, arms and legs free, the one white sock left on the pavement. A brittle, septic-smelling, bundle, damp against my blouse. Into our house past whoever opened the door, shouting myself, get this, get that, phone, phone, I can’t remember, but I know it was coherent. Breathless, upstairs, shouting some more. He was behind me in the street, I know he was, that man: he will try to get in. My voice screaming. Get Mark out of the way, and for Christ’s sake, phone.