The Commonplace Day

by Rosemary Friedman

  Tim came down the stairs like a herd of elephants, looking vulnerable in his very white shirt and city suit, and smelling of the after-shave lotion Diana had bought for his birthday. He put a slice of bread into the toaster, removed Robin’s comic from his place at the table, and sat down, unfolding the newspaper. I felt sorry for him.

  They were my family, the fruits of my seventeen-year-old marriage, and I scrambled eggs for them while they passed each other the butter and the sugar and the marmalade and made desultory breakfast noises.

  Robin was finished first and went upstairs, his nose still in the comic, then Diana when she’d got money for savings and Miss Harrison’s present, Miss Harrison was leaving to get married, out of Tim.

  Tim and I wondered between us whether there would shortly be a General Election, I tried to care, and I promised him I really would get on to them again about the cooker. He finished his second cup of coffee and I called to the children not to keep him waiting. He kissed me, hugging me to him a little, with an arm round my shoulder, and went to get the car out. I called upstairs again and Robin came down sounding just like Tim and gave me a wet smacking kiss, and had the belt of his raincoat twisted about three times. Diana inclined her head, a formality, not really touching my face, and she still didn’t smell of soap, but I couldn’t be bothered to argue, Tim was hooting. She picked up her leather bag, only nits wore satchels, which weighed about a ton, and was off in her beige stretch nylons. The door slammed, shaking the whole house, Robin. Suddenly it was quiet and they were gone.

  I sat down at the wreckage of the breakfast table and poured coffee in the silence into the one clean cup and allowed the thought to creep out, for there was no-one but myself to hear it, that this was the day on which for the first time I was going to be unfaithful to my husband.

  Two

  It was very quiet in the kitchen after all of them. The tap was dripping. Tim always complained I never could turn a tap off properly, nor tune in a radio, nor stick down an envelope for that matter. Being an accountant he was very efficient in all these matters, having a tidy sort of brain. I enjoyed the coffee among the debris, Diana hadn’t folded her napkin and had left crusts of toast. I was able to relax even under the forbidding eyes of what I called my butler and my footman; the dishwasher, without which life was unthinkable, and the fully automatic clothes-washer and dryer. We had installed them a year ago when we finally decided we could no longer give house room to the series of young ladies from the Continent who were misfits in their own homes and, in their coloured stockings and exotic hair-do’s, came to disrupt ours. The decision which had been muzzily formulating during months of discontent over the rising telephone bill, and letters with foreign stamps provoking tears or days of sulks, which in turn led to scorched shirts and broken crockery, had been finally clinched as the result of what we called in the ‘village’ our scandal. There was scandal enough behind our respectable middle-class curtains, Terylene for the most part, with lace insertions, but this was something which touched us all. We had coffee on it for weeks afterwards. Even now it sprang back into my mind when I saw some luscious piece of Switzerland or Scandinavia disdainfully propelling a push-chair or hanging uninterestedly on to the reins of some tiny child in the High Street.

  Reggie Stevens had always been one for the girls. At a party or even in the street he always had his hands all over you till Monica sighing said, Reggie, and like a schoolboy caught in the act he’d slink away somewhere where he thought she couldn’t see him. Reggie and Monica gave house-room to one Danielle who came from Paris and, as Tim said, really was an eyeful. When poor Monica came home early from town one day and found her in bed with Reggie it pulled us all up a bit sharply.

  Half the ‘village’ sensibly enough were mechanised already. Those of us who were not installed every bit of mechanical aid we could wheedle out of our husbands and put ads in the local newspaper for Daily Helps who wanted, and got, five shillings an hour. They did have their own husbands though and were not addicted in the summer-time to walking round the house in bikinis. My own ad produced Mrs MacSweeney who should in precisely two minutes, the electric wall clock said two minutes to nine, push open the back door. Clasping the milk bottles and Robin’s yoghurt, which she had collected from the back step, to her bosom she would reply to my greeting of ‘good morning’ with the sad comment that it was not a very nice one. After the scandal we all wondered what was going to happen to Monica and Reggie now that he had actually been caught in flagrante delicto with Danielle. None of us imagined for a moment that at number eleven, Monica and Reggie’s house, distinguished by the flagpole on the front lawn, the ménage à trois would continue. That was what did, to the absolute astonishment of us all, happen. While the rest of us slowly but surely, and often with unChristian glee, got rid of our Gerdas and Helgas and Hildegardes, Monica and Reggie continued to have their tea brought to them in bed every morning by the now repentant Danielle. It was a situation none of us pretended to understand, but one on which we felt we couldn’t question Monica too deeply. Iris Sayers said Monica had muttered something about not wanting to admit defeat but we could not see how she could endure the sight of the girl in the house, let alone be pleasant to her and give her pocket money every week.

  The side gate opened then clicked into place again as Mrs MacSweeney closed it tidily after her. I quickly finished the rest of my coffee, not liking to be stood over while I breakfasted.

  “Good morning, Mrs Mac.” My smile did not come easily first thing. I made an attempt, knowing it was neither first thing nor even second for her. Her husband left the house at six with a packed lunch.

  “Not a very nice one.” She clutched the bottles with the furry gloves I had given her for Christmas.

  “Foggy isn’t it?”

  “Clearing a bit now.” She coughed in an exaggerated manner. “Gets right down your throat.”

  “Put the kettle on and make a cup of tea.”

  Only her eyes lit up. She never said thank you for anything.

  “Goes right through you.” She put the milk bottles down on the draining board and, following her daily ritual, pulled off a glove, took a handkerchief from the pocket of her coat which was trimmed with imitation persian lamb, and blew her nose, making it red.

  I started to clear the breakfast because I wanted her to turn out the bathrooms.

  She said: “I’ll do that,” untying the satin ribbon inside her coat.

  “I thought you might give the bathrooms a good do today.”

  Tim said why don’t you just tell her. You are employing her. He didn’t understand the species, who came to oblige, not work, and took umbrage and left if one suggested by word or deed they did not know their own jobs.

  “I was thinking they needed a do,” Mrs Mac said thus saving her face, and hanging her coat in the cupboard from whence she extracted her overall.

  The next step was more tricky.

  “The Hoover seems to be rather full.” I occupied myself with the removal of crumbs from the toaster.

  For a moment I thought she hadn’t heard and I should have to humiliate myself once more. She was threading the tie of her overall through the slot. She wrapped it round her skinny waist and made a firm bow.

  “My one’s got paper bags,” she said taking her hat off. “’Course it’s a later model than what yours is.”

  I ceded the point not wishing to explain, in my defence, that after the dishwasher and the new Bendix Tim had put his foot down over the Hoover. He said, and he was probably right, that the old ones Hooved as well as the new and pointed out that his mother had had hers for twenty-seven years.

  Mrs Mac patted her hair into shape. “The dust flies all over,” she said, “when you empty it. I’ve been having trouble with my sinuses.”

  I pictured her at the doctor’s blaming the antiquated apparatus with which she had to work for the inflamed condition of her membranes.

  It wasn’t only the Hoover. She had taken pains over the months to
make me aware that her spin-dryer spun faster, her television loomed larger, and her equipment in general was in every way superior to mine. True she didn’t boast a demon which ground noisily to powder everything fed to it down the sink. Her Ted, she said, considered them dangerous, and that was that. Apart from this, according to Mrs Mac, the gadgets in number eight Laurel Gardens, the neat semi to which we delivered her on inclement mornings, or when there was a bus strike, were in every was superior to our own. There was one minor difference. Ours were paid for. Hers were not.

  Having changed her shoes, putting her outdoor ones neatly into the cupboard beside the carpet sweeper, Mrs Mac pulled on her yellow rubber gloves, she suffered from dermatitis, also my fault, and started to wipe the milk bottles. There was one further step in our parley before I could escape upstairs.

  “How is Ted?” I said. “And the children?”

  She was putting the bottles in the fridge. Hers defrosted automatically.

  “Ted’s all right,” she said. Ted was in light industry and always making trouble with the Union, with complaints about the sanitary arrangements and such-like. “Chrissie’s still chesty. I’ve been rubbing her in with Vapoid.”

  I thought of the Vapoid advertisement on television. A saccharine little girl, with missing front teeth and a frilly nighty, clutched a huge teddy bear, while an even more saccharine mother sniffed the Vapoid jar as though it was marijuana, to the accompaniment of saccharine music. To Mrs MacSweeney it was not in the slightest over-sweet. The plump child in the studio had become confused in her mind with the puny, unprepossessing Chrissie, and the smiling mother, who wanted to do the best for her child, undistinguishable from herself. The result of all this was a visit to the chemist and Vapoid. By the same process she spent a large proportion of her wages on peas, ‘sweeter than the day they were picked’, sausages, which were ‘chopped, never minced’, and cat food made of revolting little whole fishes incarcerated in jelly.

  “This fog doesn’t help,” she said, looking out of the window at the garden shrouded in mist. “Weather gets worse and worse. I’ll take her down the doctor’s Saturday if she’s still bad.”

  She filled the kettle, to the top, indifferent to my electricity bills.

  I put the last of the plates into the dishwasher and shut it.

  “Shall I bring you a cup?” Mrs Mac said, plugging the kettle in.

  “No thank you. I’m going to have my bath.”

  I left her to it aware that before I reached the first stair the cigarettes and matches would be out of her overall pocket.

  In the children’s rooms there was mild chaos; in Diana’s rather, because in Robin’s room the mess was organised so I suppose you couldn’t really call it chaos.

  Watched by the petrified stares of the pop group I picked up three playing cards, a suspender belt, to which was attached one stocking, a Crunchie paper, and Great Expectations. On the wash-basin the flannel was bone dry although for a change the toothbrush was wet. She had probably run it under the tap. The room was pink with pink-and-white striped wallpaper on the wall behind the bed. We had had it redecorated for Diana’s birthday and allowed her to choose the colour and the paper which was a mistake. She’d been thrilled to bits at the time and dragged everyone up to see it, even the fish boy. The pink was too pink and the stripe on the wallpaper far too heavy. Now she voted the whole thing revolting and said it was our fault for allowing her to choose. She had nagged about it for months. Sally had chosen her wallpaper and Cynthia who, if we were to believe all Diana told us, lived in a cross between the Negresco at Nice and Buckingham Palace, had herself picked everything for her room from Maples, even down to the Dresden toothbrush holder, which I thought was going a bit far. They were their own small worst enemies as we had recently begun to discover. Tim and I had started off as modern parents determined that our children should not suffer, as we had, the ignominy of no-one listening to our opinions, the dislike of being treated as small children far into adolescence, the shame of being seen and not heard. The mistake we made was to swing the pendulum too far and give the children a freedom they wanted but did not want; they begged for but were not equipped to cope with. With Diana, as in the case of the bedroom wallpaper, we found ourselves in the bewildering position of having our kindness flung back into our faces. It had been the same with the piano. Could she learn to play the piano? Everyone learned to play the piano. She adored the piano. She wanted to be a pianist. As a family we were strictly non-musical. Robin, of us all, was the only one able to sing a note and he was quite happy with the recorder he had made at school. We left it for a year thinking that it would blow over. For twelve months we seemed to hear nothing but piano, piano, piano, until we were under the impression that we were cruelly frustrating an incipient genius and began to scan the columns of the local newspaper for news of a secondhand piano. We tracked one down and installed it in the dining-room, where it spoiled the décor, and by the same medium a Miss Morani, who looked about a hundred and smelled of mothballs, but came highly recommended. All this was two years ago. We waited for our genius to emerge but nothing happened. Nothing that was except a trickle of uninspiring pieces, less inspiringly played, rushed in the easy bits, and extorted with agony in the more difficult. The piano became an object of hatred; Miss Morani likewise. Why did we ever make her learn the piano? We who had suffered. She never wanted to learn the piano in the first place. Couldn’t she stop her piano lessons? But you nagged, Diana, you nagged and nagged, it was the thing you most wanted to do in the world. The world had changed. Did I? – Was she that innocent? – If I did I don’t remember. I suppose two years out of twelve is quite a high proportion. In any case I don’t want to learn any more. We were cruel parents. Fancy forcing anyone to learn to play the piano when they didn’t want to learn to play the piano. We might have known, Diana said, she wasn’t musical. None of us were. It was then we discovered that they were more on our side than on their own, to which by tradition they were bound to adhere. We were not greatly surprised therefore when Diana told us that in the school debate she had opposed the motion that children should be allowed to watch television as much as they wished. Diana who branded us inquisitors nightly. Lately we had stuck to our guns impervious to impassioned accounts of the liberties and dispensations permitted, if we were to believe all we were told, which I no longer thought Diana really expected us to, by the parents of Cynthia and Sally and ‘all the other people in my class’. Well, when questioned closely, ‘nearly all’.

  Robin was easier. His room too. There was not a great deal one was allowed to tidy. I folded his pyjamas which were in a heap on the floor, stepped across the railway lines which criss-crossed the carpet, leaned over the complicated cardboard calendar which told not only the day and the month, but the year and the weather and the temperature on the roof of thirty-four Hazelbank which was our house, and opened the window. With Robin we had none of the fluctuations of mood we suffered with Diana, but something which was in a way even more difficult to cope with; his bull-like obstinacy. Once Robin dug his heels in over anything it was, as with Tim’s father, impossible to move him. We had to be one jump ahead all the time so that he did not find himself in a position from which he was incapable of capitulation. Like a permanent object lesson the Tower of London stuck firmly in our minds. The outing had been planned for weeks and the children were looking forward to it, Robin particularly. It was Saturday morning and Tim was playing golf. Diana run up and get ready I said, and Robin change your trousers, then we can have lunch and leave as soon as Daddy comes in. Robin was reading on the floor, a comic I suppose, he was always reading comics. He was eight at the time. These trousers are all right, he said, his nose still in the comic. You could see your face in the back of them. Don’t be silly, go up and change, your others are on the bed. I’m not changing my trousers, no-one will see. You aren’t going out like that. Why not? Because I said so. Go along now. Be a good boy. I’m not going; it’s silly changing just for the Tower of Lon
don; I’ll be wearing my mac anyway. Robin! I was getting angry. Go up and change and be quick about it. No. If you don’t change your trousers you aren’t going to the Tower. You can stay at home. We were wiser now. I’ll stay at home then. Don’t be silly; be a good boy now; wash and change. I’ll wash but I’m not changing my trousers; these trousers are all right. You’ll stay at home then. And he did. I don’t know who had the more miserable afternoon; Diana and Tim and I gazing vacantly at the Crown Jewels with the knowledge of poor Robin at home spoiling our pleasure, or Robin himself defiantly reading the same comic over and over in the company of Suki from Finland who couldn’t speak a word of English. We were careful now not to let these situations develop and were becoming masters of diplomacy at dealing with Robin. As long as we were able to avoid pitting our wills against his Robin was a lamb, no trouble at all. He belonged to Tim’s family, and nowhere in him did I recognise myself.