The Commonplace Day

by Rosemary Friedman

  In my own room there was only my mess. Tim was as tidy as his ordered mind dictated and there wasn’t a thing of his about. I stripped the bed, ran the bath in the bathroom that opened off the bedroom, and wondered what I should wear in which to commit adultery.

  The telephone rang and it was Martha so I could keep my thoughts, my real thoughts, for a little longer in the cage in which they were confined. I settled down on the bed for a while to provide an ear for the unorganised outpourings of Martha’s cluttered mind.

  The telephone was grey, one of the new, lightweight ones with a twisted plastic cord, and I lay down full length in my nylon dressing-gown and listened to the torrent of words which fell higgledy-piggledy out of the receiver.

  We’d seen them only nine hours ago, the end of the gin reminding Jack that it was time to go, but Martha wanted to know how was I darling, not really listening to the answer, but telling me how she hadn’t slept and had to get up at three o’clock and take a tablet. Now she felt as if a steam-roller had been over her. She had taken something or other ’zine to carry her through until her next session with her analyst and was hoping to God it would hurry up and work. I hung on while she found an ashtray then she started on the lounge curtains.

  Martha and Jack were in the van of the suburban house renovators. Because of the recent inflationary rise in the price of property, moving, for most of us, was beyond our means. Jack had been doing extraordinarily well recently in property but not sufficiently well to make the transition to a town house which Martha would have liked. Instead, after the central heating and the terrace, which had become a sine qua non of ‘village’ life, they had converted their garage into a rumpus-room, American style, added a new double garage, above which was another bedroom and bathroom, and were now involved in a complete reconstruction of the ground floor.

  They had started off with a fashionable interior decorator who said out with the staircase and a couple of walls. They took his advice then Martha had a row with him over the windows, he insisted on what Martha called fish-tank and hated, and he went off in a huff. They were now in the midst of a law-suit over his fees.

  Michael, the pink-shirted youth who replaced him, closed his gorgeous eyes despairingly, said they had removed quite the wrong walls and how sad they had not called him in the first place.

  About the curtains Martha said on the other end of the telephone, what did I think of straw? They had decided on straw-coloured hessian for the walls and Michael said definitely the same for the curtains to preserve the unity.

  It sounded deadly to me, all that straw-colouring, but Martha didn’t really want my opinion just to air hers. Without waiting for an answer she started on under-floor heating, or did I think hot air ducts, and I suddenly remembered my bath. I’ll speak to you later then, Martha said; how about lunch? I had to have lunch somewhere so I said all right, then was sorry because it might be difficult to get away. Martha said one o’clock at Bendick’s and I hung up.

  It was nearly up to the waste-pipe and the bathroom filled with steam. I put on the shower cap and some nourishing cream on my face taking it right down my neck, today was important, and got in.

  The water slopped over the drain and I heard it gurgling down and thought Mrs Mac would be running up soon to say there’s water coming from somewhere. For the moment though it was quiet and the water beautifully hot and I lay back until I was quite immersed except for my head and allowed myself to think about Dobbie.

  Three

  I wondered what he was doing. Had he stayed in all morning putting the tiger-skin rugs down on the floor, or had he gone to his office as usual? He had of course. For Dobbie it was an ordinary day, and I was probably down in his diary between lunch at the Savoy Grill and cocktails at the Polish Embassy, or one of the other Eastern European countries he did business with. He had interests in everything from cigars to citrus and travelled the world to administer them. Dobbie, of course, had nothing to lose. He was not going to pace the flat all day quaking in his shoes. Not that I was quaking. I had had long enough to make up my mind. There was no-one behind me pushing me into it, and I had been careful enough to be confident there were no sanctions ahead. I had lived through this particular day so many times in my dreams, both of the day and night variety, that I was not apprehensive as I might have been. Like an actress who had been through months of rehearsal I felt that I knew my part. There would probably be some first-night nerves but I was, if only through fantasy, familiar with my role. At any rate it would be better than car keys, a game played by a particular set in the village to which I did not belong.

  It was Olga Tindal who had started it, and she’d brought it from America. It was horribly crude and I thought I was justified in thinking that it bore no relationship whatsoever to what I was contemplating with Dobbie.

  Olga Tindal had been an absolute corker before she was married. She was one of those honey blondes about whom everything, when we were eighteen, was just right. She had an exquisite face with translucent green eyes, at which you just had to look twice, an enviable figure, and taut cream skin that begged for exposure in evening dresses or swim-suits. She had been amoral then, and I don’t mean only as far as sex was concerned. She wove intricate lies, unable to differentiate in her own mind, I think, between fact and fantasy, spread the most appalling muck about people, and would let you down at the drop of a hairpin. She was the kind of girl who would date a nice, but not very interesting, boy for a night she happened to have free, and let him down, with no qualms whatsoever, if something more interesting turned up. It was the same with women. I’d always known Olga, our mothers were friends, and in spite of her characteristics, some of which were pretty foul, you could deny neither her beauty nor the charm that went with it. She was not to be relied on, though, for a moment. She was too busy feathering her own nest. She’d bought a fabulous dress, she’d say, and wanted to give it to you for five pounds because she’d put on weight and was unable to get into it. At five pounds it would seem a bargain. Then you’d sit down in it and discover that it creased so badly that it was unwearable. It was five pounds down the drain as Olga very well knew, although she’d open her green eyes innocently wide in denial. In the same way she would borrow your white satin evening bag and return it smudged with lipstick, books, and keep them, unimportant but annoying, and smaller things like Biros and hankies which you knew you could say goodbye to. The trouble with Olga was that you knew, and she knew too, that about her was an appealing quality, undefinable, which made it impossible to refuse her anything. Whether it was her eyes which she could almost liquify at will or her smile, dazzling in those days, I don’t know, but she had this mysterious quality of getting things from people and she had traded on it all her life. Out of all the boys who had revolved around her like moths around a flame, for some reason that none of us had ever been able to fathom, Olga had married Archie Tindal. Archie was a weedy little chap with a bottomless fund of filthy jokes and bedroom eyes. True he had money, but then so did a good many of the others who had courted Olga. Martha said that although Olga boasted that they did none of them ever asked her to marry him. After they’d slept with her, a pastime about which, in her own words, she wasn’t fussy, they’d gone on to find somebody more discriminating. Whatever it was that promoted it she’d married Archie and had two daughters, one of whom looked fabulous like Olga and the other, poor little thing, like her father, although rumour had it she was clever. Not that Olga was any longer fabulous in appearance, although a lot of us would still give quite a bit for some of her looks even as she was now. She had ruined her honey-blonde hair with bleaches. Some weeks she was pink, some feathered gold and silver, some platinum. She wore it short now and very formal, exaggeratedly high or wide according to the fashion. It was not her hair though which had changed most. It was her face; that gorgeous, open face. There were no lines on it. Her skin still, in her thirties, was with no exaggeration like the finest porcelain. It was the expression which had altered. At eighteen it
had betrayed the fact that she considered the world was hers; at thirty-six it showed that she was no longer sure but was engaged in a bitter fight to make it so. Her eyes which before were inviting, were calculating, her mouth which had been soft, mobile, twitched with dissatisfaction. You wouldn’t think she had anything to be dissatisfied about. She had a lovely house and a bronze Renault Floride with an open top, and a black poodle and two nice children and, of all of us, a maid in a cap and apron. About Olga now there was a sort of desperateness as though she’d been under the impression that life had promised her something else; as if she’d been cheated and didn’t know quite whom to blame. I think that all of us in the ‘village’ felt this way to a certain extent. There was about us a restlessness which was difficult to define. We were happy, most of us, prima facie at any rate, but we eyed each other with a kind of predatory wariness in case one of us achieved something the other hadn’t. It was not simply a question of keeping up with the Joneses but something more subtle than a yearning for material things. This vague awareness, for it was no more than that, of something that had passed us by was perhaps best reflected in the way we read avidly in our newspapers of the nightly shenanigans of the notorious, the titled and the wealthy and felt ourselves, by comparison, to be living in a curious and unsettling limbo. We had good, hardworking husbands, children, two cars in the garage. We were happy; yet we were not. We had the impression, unvoiced but running like a nebulous common denominator through the ‘village’, that we had missed something. Like Olga we did not quite know what.

  Olga had always entertained a great deal. She’d taken a course at the Cordon Bleu School and her parties, over which she went to a great deal of trouble, were always beautifully done. She had help with the preparation and the serving but she always did the cooking herself and the dishes she prepared, especially when it was a cold buffet, were an experience both to look at and to eat.

  In the early days Tim and I had usually been invited. We were fairly friendly and the evenings at the Tindals’ were always enjoyable, although inclined to be a bit much when Archie really got started on his jokes. After we’d all been married for a while though, and were shaking down in the ‘village’, we discovered that Olga and Archie were collecting about them a different crowd and that we didn’t really fit in. Olga had always been a bit of a collector, of people that was, and she and Archie gradually built up around them a new set, and little by little dropped their old friends. We were still on good terms, talking about our children or old times when we met in the hairdresser’s or the fishmonger’s, but we were no longer on visiting terms except occasionally at Christmas or when they decided to have a cocktail party and include a bloc as it were from the old guard. The criteria for membership of Olga and Archie’s new set were, I believe, money, the sort that came in lashings, small fame of some sort – periphery film and stage people – or notoriety in the sexual field. In addition to these they ferreted out the other Olgas and Archies of the ‘village’, those, that is, who were not averse to a change of partner now and again.

  The idea of the car keys game was this. The Tindals or one of the other couples arranged a party. When the company was assembled and had been well dined and wined, the men threw their car keys into a hat where they were shaken and picked, one each, blindfold, by the women. The owner of the car key each picked was her sleeping partner for the night, or perhaps the evening, I don’t know the details. It was as simple as that, and if one believed all reports, tremendous fun. According to Martha it had caught on like wild-fire in the suburbs of America and wasn’t doing at all badly here.

  I did not equate myself with Olga.

  Neither did I have any illusions.

  I have known Dobbie from childhood, but then I have known Tim that long too. They were at school with my brother Gray, who owed his name to the fact that Mother had a thing about Somerset Maugham at the time of his birth, although he and Dobbie were quite a bit older than Tim.

  Perhaps my first real memory of Dobbie, as a person, not as a child, was when I was six, Dobbie and Gray thirteen. It was Gray’s birthday. He had been given an enormous constructional kit, he loved building, and we were on the floor with it in his bedroom, which ran the length of the top of the house, and was already full of railways, vintage cars, and aeroplanes he had made. I remember Gray saying, I know, we’ll build a complete village, houses, shops, church, that sort of thing, and getting quite excited. Dobbie got up and looked out of the window. His name was Arthur Dobson but he was Dobbie to everyone. I hate houses, he said. I hate building things; except skyscrapers. I like everything to be big and to move about all over the place.

  It was badly expressed, perhaps, but it summed up exactly Dobbie’s attitude to life. He hated things small and settled like Gray, who had become an architect, and now lived happily at Cookham in a house he had built himself.

  Gray’s house was modern and orderly like Gray himself, his wife Diana, and their daughter Jennifer who seemed never to bring mud into, or scatter her belongings about, the open plan. Everything slid or was concealed, and really was tremendously elegant with a whacking view of the river through the picture windows. I always had the impression, when visiting them, that I was waiting for something and had discovered one day that it was the salesman, who I felt sure was going to pop out, old school tie and rubbing his hands, from between the curved Heals’ sofa, seven foot long, and the teak wall unit, Swedish, which housed drinks, a television set, and many of the other necessities of modern living, including books with shiny covers which I don’t think any of them read much.

  Gray always mixed the drinks himself and was fussy about them, wiping the glasses first with a coloured tea-towel printed with vodka bottles, kept especially for the purpose, and bringing your glass complete with coaster.

  Dobbie had a flat in Knightsbridge, but the world was his High Street. He was equally at home in Rotterdam or Hong Kong, New York or Bulawayo. He liked everything to be big, he said, and took planes for San Francisco as easily as the bus for Selfridges. His view of the wood had never been obscured by the trees.

  In those childhood days when he spoke of the things he was going to do and be I suppose he represented to me a world of adventure, a world where anything was likely to happen.

  He still did.

  When Tim and I were coping with measles, or a period of no domestic help, or frozen pipes, a postcard would arrive from Dobbie from somewhere on the far side of the world, conjuring up blue skies and tepid seas, and an existence far removed from our own.

  Whenever he was in England he’d ring us up or sometimes not even bother, just walk in and stay for dinner, and spend the evening taking us out of our rut with accounts of things he had done and people he had met in various parts of the globe. He loved relaxing with us, he said, it made him see what he, a bachelor, was missing in the way of domestic bliss. We knew he didn’t mean it. That it was all right for an evening or two, but after that the novelty would pall and he would be itching to be off. He loved the children, wasn’t at all bored by them, again I suppose it was the novelty. Often he carted them off to the zoo and told them about the elephants he had seen in their natural surroundings, and to the circus and pantomime, people like Dobbie never seemed to have to book up, and to Claridges for lunch.

  I’d often wondered what he would be like to sleep with. Any woman must have done. Dobbie was as handsome as Gregory Peck or Cary Grant or any of those clean-looking actors of the older school, not the mean-looking method boys of today. Just recently I’d noticed his jaw was losing its clear outline a little, and sometimes there were little pockets of puffy flesh beneath his eyes. These in no way detracted from the general picture of what was known as a man’s man but was in reality every lady’s man. He was over six foot and broad-shouldered and looked good in lounge suit, dinner jacket, or sweater; similarly he was equally at home in office, night club, or on skis of the snow or water variety. The only picture of him at which the imagination really baulked was the domestic one
, doing dishes, gardening, walking a crying baby in the night. He did these things occasionally when he was with us but it was as if he was playing a part and not to the manner born. Whenever Dobbie came I always looked my best. I don’t think that Tim ever noticed, but if he arrived unexpectedly I’d dash up and change from the skirt and jumper I was wearing into the nattiest dress or slinkiest pants I had. If he’d warned us beforehand I’d be sure to have my hair done and often, in a fit of excitement, buy something new for the occasion. I suppose it was that when he came he brought a breath of foreign airports and Hiltons with him and the uniform of the ‘village’ suddenly became dowdy and inadequate.

  I didn’t envy Dobbie his world, nor was I seriously discontented with my own. I knew perfectly well that what Tim and I had created together were the lasting things, and that although Dobbie appeared to have everything he really had nothing, except perhaps the playboy’s gift of making you feel like a million dollars. It was pleasant after a day of chasing after green Fablon and rugger socks to be given a large bottle of Diorissimo and one of champagne and told you looked prettier than ever; somehow, temporarily, you did.

  I cannot pinpoint the precise day I conceived the idea of an affair with Dobbie. At one moment it was the vague, unattainable, romantic idea that I had always had and the next it was something that I knew I was going to do. First I felt very daring, then terribly sorry for Tim, then absolutely obsessed with the idea and how I was to bring it about. There was no hurry. I made the mistake of believing Dobbie could read my thoughts and consequently was aware of my change of attitude towards him. He still kissed me when he came and went, called me darling as if he meant it, as he did everybody, flattered me as he always had, but otherwise remained exactly the same. It became clear that the idea was mine alone and that I would have to construct a plan of how I was going to engineer a situation which would result in the end I was determined, brazenly, to bring about.