The Commonplace Day

by Rosemary Friedman

  “A melancholy picture of marriage,” I said. “I suppose I’m putting you off. It isn’t all like that. It has its moments. Sometimes, I’m deliriously happy for weeks at a time; sometimes in the depths, nothing right. The external factors remain the same, Tim, the children. It’s obviously me. Why did you never marry?”

  “I’ve told you before, I couldn’t find a girl like you.”

  “No, seriously.”

  “I’m being serious.”

  It was nice to believe.

  “Remember the old days? You and Tim and the girl with the freckles…”

  “Annette.”

  “Annette Armstrong. You see how old I’m getting. I used to watch you and Tim, wishing it was me with you, Tim with Annette.”

  “I think I knew. Women always do. You said nothing.”

  “There was so much I wanted to do. I couldn’t afford to get involved. Not with ‘nice’ girls at any rate.”

  “Sometimes I wonder whether we weren’t too nice.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I never slept with anyone but Tim. There’s a new morality today; a new immorality. I shan’t know what to tell Diana. I think it’s confusing for them.”

  “I always admire the way you’ve brought up Robin and Diana.”

  “You do? I seem to do so badly. One applies one’s knowledge but they never react according to the book. They let you down. You wonder where you’ve gone wrong.”

  “If they grow up like their Mother, they’ll be all right. You’re one of the most complete people I know.”

  “‘As others see us’. That’s the last thing I’d call myself. You’ve no idea what Tim has to put up with.”

  “Has Tim no faults?”

  “It’s different for men. They’re out doing things. They don’t have to sit at home bottling it all up.”

  “Poor bottled Liz.” He kissed me.

  It went on for a long time and it must have been obvious how obsessed I was with him and how I’d thought of practically nothing else for months. When we surfaced Dobbie was no longer smiling and I realised it had been a mistake to come to the flat despite Dobbie’s assurances and that it was all happening too soon. With an effort I remembered there was dinner to cook at home and the Haynes bringing Diana, and Robin to be fetched from the boy he was spending the day with.

  I took out my compact and looked at the wreckage and realised that it was more than could be dealt with in a tiny mirror and that I was trembling.

  “I’d better tidy up.”

  “Don’t go, Liz.”

  “We should have sat in the park.”

  He was looking at me steadily so I chattered on. “Come to dinner, nothing terribly interesting, lamb, I left it on the automatic oven, I hope it works, sometimes it gets a bit temperamental.”

  He said nothing.

  “Will you come?”

  “I don’t think I could bear to sit and look at you all evening.”

  I didn’t want to let him go. “You can’t just stop coming,” I said reasonably. “Tim would think it odd.”

  “We mustn’t let Tim think it odd.”

  “Don’t be sarcastic.”

  “I didn’t mean to be.”

  “Dobbie.” A thought suddenly struck me.

  “Liz?” I loved the way he said it.

  “You don’t think I’m ridiculous, throwing myself at your head?”

  “Look in the mirror, Liz. No, not that little one.”

  I stood up and looked in the mirror over the mantelpiece in its Regency stepped frame. There was a feminine quality in the face that looked out despite the streaked make-up, an aura of desirability, of softness, nothing to ridicule.

  “I was a bit afraid, thinking of Catherine, the others… I suppose there are others.”

  He stood behind me holding my shoulders. “You’re too inquisitive.”

  “I hate them all.”

  “So do I.”

  He came home and sat on the kitchen table talking to me while I prepared dinner, waiting for Tim to come home and the Haynes with Diana. I sent him into the garden for mint for the sauce and he came back with a handful of antirrhinum leaves.

  The lamb was tender and went down well although I wasn’t very hungry not being used to a midday lunch and the children were full of their outings and in good spirits.

  Tim told us of a client who had paid fifty thousand pounds for a Van Gogh and I said ‘men again’. Only Dobbie knew what I meant and said he might just as easily have been a woman. Tim said oh no a woman would not have been sent on a mission to the Belgian coal mines nor visited all those terribly enriching brothels. I looked quickly at the children but they were playing noughts and crosses on the tablecloth with forks.

  While I cleared away and made coffee Tim and Dobbie watched the middle-weight boxing sitting forward in their chairs and saying the referee should have stopped the fight in the ninth round.

  We talked a bit after that then Dobbie said he must go and Tim said why so early. I felt suddenly jealous in case it was a woman. It was only nine o’clock and I knew Dobbie never went to bed before midnight.

  “A date?” Tim said voicing my thoughts. “You already have lipstick on your collar.”

  Eight

  I had given a lot of thought to my feelings vis-à-vis Dobbie and had come to the conclusion that the excitement, the joyousness I felt about the whole affair, was engendered by the fact that in Dobbie’s eyes I was still Liz Westbury whereas in Tim’s I had become his wife. I wanted to assert myself somehow as an individual, to escape from the daily intimacies which created neither sympathy nor understanding. Had I been able to regain this personalisation once more for Tim, I would have thrown myself at him with the same abandon I was preparing to do with Dobbie; I loved Tim but his eyes were misted with seventeen years of matrimony; mine too, to be fair, as far as he was concerned. He knew what I did all day, occupying my proper place and concerning myself with spending and getting on behalf of him and the children, yet nothing, nothing, of what was in my mind. I couldn’t tell him, and he didn’t ask, of my secret dreams, fancies, yearnings; the temptations I had to conquer, doubts to overcome; he was profoundly ignorant of the emotional climate in which I spent my day. It was expected of me that I shop, cook, organise, fulfil the physical needs of my family; they would have been deeply shocked to discover anything other than complete satisfaction with these functions in mind. I had become, over the years, a wife and mother; somewhere along the line Liz Westbury, Liz Palmer that was, had disappeared; simply dissolved. In her place Mrs Timothy Westbury, nurse, housekeeper, mother, gardener, cook, seamstress, cleaner, governess, administrator, did what was expected of her. I was not naïve enough to expect a vote of thanks for every bed I made, every pie I created. The feeling I had come to rebel against was that I was expected to fulfil all my functions at the proper time and that it was taken for granted that at the said proper time all the functions, despite my own whims, hopes, dreams, thoughts, would be fulfilled. The fact that I was able to cook, sew, clean, etcetera, was guaranteed by society, implied by the fact that I was married. Nobody doubted for one moment that I wanted to have breakfast ready at eight, dinner at 7.30. They would have been shocked, Tim most of all, to realise that my patience, my tolerance, my propriety were not built in any more than his were. He spoke of me with affection to his friends; Liz is a wonderful wife, cook, mother. It was a mantle deposited on one at the altar. Whether it fitted or not, one was destined to wear it, muffling the thing of flesh and blood struggling to get out. With the acceptance of my wedding ring I had forfeited the right to say I have no idea how to wash a shirt and today we will have no breakfast. I was a woman in a man’s world and like his desk was expected to be in my place at all times. I loved Tim and hated him for his complacency. I did not know him either. Of course in the inessential things, how he liked his bath, his eggs, his reaction to my own stupidity, the children’s; not what he was in the world of men; his office staff, even the most recent acquisitions,
most likely knew him better. The difference was that if Tim had decided to have an affair with another woman, I would have hated it like mad, felt completely degraded, but I would have understood that it was possible, in the nature of things. Had Tim known what was in my mind, however, concerning Dobbie, he would have been completely and utterly shattered, hurt, bewildered. My fidelity was taken for granted along with the strict adherence to the regimen I had adopted. It was different for men; so the myth went. That our desires, temptations, fantasies were identical, needed to be overcome, was not acceptable; not even true. It was different for men.

  On the day after my lunch with Dobbie at the Porterhouse Mrs Mac retired to bed with water-on-the-knee. Her Ted, who telephoned with the news, said she would be out of action for at least a week.

  We were all ready for our outing to Kew. I had on a white dress. I took the blue overall which had been a smock when I was pregnant down from behind the kitchen door and the gloves from the pocket and called the children in from the garden, where Diana was curled in a deck-chair with a book, and Robin swinging on one leg.

  “We’ll have to go to Kew another day. Mrs Mac’s not coming.”

  “What difference does that make?” Diana said.

  “There’s all the housework to do.”

  “Can’t we leave it?”

  “There’s dinner to get ready for Daddy tonight. Mrs Mac was going to prepare it, and the house is in a mess. If I’d known I could have started earlier. I can’t go out for the whole day, and it’s hardly worth going for less.”

  “It’s jolly well not fair.”

  Kew was a favourite. Robin took a whole loaf of bread and we always lost him for a good hour while he fed the fish which jumped out of the pond’s murky water to snatch it.

  “We’ll go another time,” I said.

  “Will you take us swimming, then?”

  “This afternoon.” I was about to ask Diana to lend me a hand, more for the company than anything, but they disappeared into the garden.

  In the cleaning cupboard the Hoover was wedged behind the hard broom and the electric polisher. I tried to get it out the lazy way, without moving the other things. It stuck half-way so I had to put it back again and start from the beginning, taking out the broom and the polisher as I should have done in the first place. When it was out, the bag of course full, I reached for the dustpan on the shelf and it came down with a shower of dust and flower petals and cigarette ends. Lazy cow, I said of Mrs Mac. She had at least washed the dusters.

  I decided to start on the sitting-room. When I could be bothered I tidied up at night, shaking the cushions, Tim wouldn’t have these modern foam rubber things, said they were uncomfortable and only for people sitting in adverts, not really to relax in, removing the day’s newspapers and emptying the ashtrays. Last night I hadn’t done so, tired after my outing, leaving it for Mrs Mac. I was sorry now. It looked comfortable and lived-in at night, sordid this morning with the sun washing over it. The chair where Dobbie had sat still bore his imprint, his cigarette stubs were in the Limoges ashtray. Looking at these manifestations of him made me want him and I wondered whether he was going to phone. Beneath the sofa cushions I found half-a-crown and a red Biro and a couple of peanuts. We hadn’t had peanuts since the previous weekend when Martha and Jack and Olga and Archie and a few of the others had come in for drinks on Sunday morning. My anger at Mrs Mac increased and I wondered whether I should get somebody else. By the time I had finished tidying and dusting properly, with a wash-leather and vinegar water, and Hoovering, the dust flying up through a tiny hole in the bag, I was tired and sorry I hadn’t taken off the white dress instead of just putting the overall on top, and wondered where Mrs Mac got the energy.

  I pushed the Hoover into the hall and put the dustpan and dusters on the stairs and came back to the doorway to admire my work. The room looked nice, cared for. I loved it in summer when you could put roses everywhere and get that House and Garden look of elegance. Not that it would last long. Robin would come in and hurl himself on the sofa and put the bits of the rocket he had got out of the cereal packet on the coffee-table and Diana would shed her shoes, her latest irritating habit, and that would be that. You’d have to tidy up all over again. Housework was so negative, you never had anything to show for it; not even if you spent your entire life at it, years and years and years, keeping down the dust and the dirt and the moths and the accumulation of deteriorating rubbish one seemed to collect. You didn’t have one single thing at the end of it all that you could produce and say this is the sum total of my life’s work, this is what I have slaved, worked my fingers to the bone for. Not that I did work my fingers to the bone, not like Mrs Mac did cleaning two homes, but I did a fair bit and often thought how futile it all was. Take the cupboards. There were four of us and summer and winter and school clothes and play clothes, weekday clothes, and weekend clothes, working clothes and relaxing clothes, not to mention special equipment for the various sports Tim and the children indulged in. They all had to be kept in order on the shelves and gone through every now and again. They got in such a mess, particularly the children’s, whose things rapidly became obsolete as they grew out of them. I had fits of doing cupboards. When I’d had one they would all be freshly papered, everything in neat piles, and I’d keep going back to look at the order I had created. It lasted about two days. It was not only the children who were guilty. If I was in a hurry I tossed things quickly into my own drawers, taking and rejecting gloves and scarves and handkerchiefs. However well you did the job, in no time it needed doing again. When you considered that you’d be tidying up, sorting out, chasing the dust to eternity, like Sisyphus and his rock it became depressing. I sympathised with Esther Glover who lived next door to Martha and made her family take their shoes off at the front door, wet or dry, greeted every caller with ‘wipe your feet’, and emptied every ashtray as soon as you’d dirtied it. She even kept the day’s newspapers in a drawer and generally made everybody’s life a misery. Our husbands worked all day. I often wondered how they would like it if, at the end of it, small demons arrived and upset every single thing they had done so that next morning they would have to start all over again. Cooking was worse, I suppose; you could spend the entire day in the kitchen preparing one meal and still in ten to fifteen minutes, after the family had sat down, it would be consumed. How would an artist like it, a painter? Some women drove their husbands mad. Martha’s sister, for instance, was an excellent cook but kept asking did you like the lemon-meringue pie, John? Didn’t you think the filling was nice, and what about the pastry? Until you wondered if the lemon-meringue was for her husband or her husband was for the lemon-meringue. It was the only satisfaction she had.

  I decided to do the kitchen next and got the breakfast dishes into the dishwasher and cleaned the frying pan with Brillo, and the cooker, where the fat had splashed, and the tops, and put away the mats and the unused cutlery and the salt and pepper and jam jars and cereal packets. I put out the milk bottles, rinsed, and swept up and removed the crumbs from the trap at the bottom of the toaster, and thought it really was rather a nice kitchen. Robin and Diana came in and said it was sweating and could they have some elevenses and I said yes although it was not quite ten, and I went up to do the beds. When I came down there were pools of Ribena on the table and on the draining board I had shined up, and a bottle of milk and the Nesquik tin and two teaspoons. The drawers were open and there was the biscuit box on the dishwasher and silver paper on the floor and crumbs by the back door. I went to the open window and was about to shout, “Robin, Diana, come in this instant and clear up the mess you’ve made.” Then I looked at them sprawled on the rug, sunbathing, and thought it’s the only time, absolutely the only time when you are free and the wicked part about it is that you don’t know. They say that the birth of children is the death of parents, that in bringing forth progeny you have fulfilled your biological function; we who were dying knew we were alive but those who really were flowering, Robin and Diana o
n the rug, had no conception of their good fortune; Diana wishing the years away until she could smother her beautiful skin in make-up, Robin setting the present at naught and thinking only in terms of when he would be grown up. Grown up and dead; or dying. They lay with their legs and arms sprawled out, abandoned, Diana with the hat she had bought in Italy over her face, unaware that they were happy. They hated their lives. Diana not being allowed to do the things she imagined she wanted to do, Robin jibbing at the certain restrictions which had to be imposed. They yearned to be old, independent, grown-up. It made you want to shake them sometimes, to scream into their ears, don’t you realise, you have something to hold on to, what everybody wants. No; they longed to be old.

  Dobbie had said he would telephone at ten. It was five to and I felt my stomach hollow with expectation. I cleared up the mess the children had made, killing time really, not wanting to go upstairs before he rang in case I was half-way up with the Hoover. We had been taking a picnic to Kew. It was half-ready in the basket so I thought we’d have it anyway in the garden. It would be pleasant and save making lunch. It was ten o’clock and I fiddled around with the sink which was tidy, then polished up the electric kettle and the handle of the fridge and the front of the dishwasher. It was two minutes past and I thought he’s forgotten and put the cloth away. As I did the phone rang and I dived into the hall like a rocket.

  “Hallo,” I said, blushing to no-one. “You’re a minute late!”

  “For what?” Tim said.

  Tim! I looked at the receiver in horror.

  “Martha,” I said. “I thought it was Martha. Martha said she’d ring…”

  “Yes. Well never mind,” Tim said. “Look, darling, I left a name and a telephone number on a piece of paper in the top pocket of my grey suit. Do you think you can find it?”