The Commonplace Day

by Rosemary Friedman

  “Hold on.” I put the receiver down by the green bowl with the roses which needed doing again, they didn’t last long, and went upstairs. Lucky I hadn’t said, “Hallo, Dobbie.” I should have to be more careful in future. I found the piece of paper and it said Maxwell Murray Tat. 3934.

  “What exchange is that?” I said to Tim.

  “What?”

  “Tat?”

  “Tate Gallery.”

  “Of course.”

  All right, darling?”

  “Fine, yes.”

  “Must rush then. See you tonight.” He blew a kiss into the telephone. I kissed him back.

  It rang immediately I replaced the receiver.

  “Manor 3843.”

  “You sound terribly efficient.”

  “Who’s that?” I wasn’t being caught again.

  “Dobbie. What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong. I just wasn’t sure it was you.”

  “I said ten. You were engaged.”

  “I know. Tim phoned.”

  “Are you all ready?”

  “For what?”

  “Kew Gardens.”

  “We’re not going. Mrs Mac isn’t coming.”

  “Who’s Mrs Mac?”

  “The daily.”

  “What’s she got to do with it?”

  He really did not know.

  “She was to do everything at home while I was out.”

  “Can’t you just leave it? There’s no-one to do anything for if you’re all out.”

  It was useless explaining about beds and ironing and vegetables and things and that it was the day for the collars laundry.

  “We’re not going anyway. I’m taking them swimming this afternoon.”

  “That will be nice. What are you doing now?”

  “Hoovering. I’m just going to do the upstairs. What are you?”

  “I’m at the airport. I’m just off to Paris.”

  In Dobbie’s world there was no dirt, no dust, no unmade beds. I wondered whether he was alone.

  “What for?”

  “Business. What do you think?”

  “I don’t know. Women?”

  He laughed. “I do work sometimes, you know. Anyway, Liz, they seem to have lost their appeal.”

  “Who?”

  “All the addresses in my book.”

  “What about Catherine?”

  “I haven’t seen her. I wish you were coming with me.”

  “I thought you said it was business.”

  “I’d find time for you.”

  ‘I wish I was, too.”

  “Come on then.”

  He was safe. Even Dobbie knew that every hour off, let alone day or weekend, had to be planned for, domestic ties subtly unwound.

  “Look, Liz. They’ve just announced my flight.”

  He hadn’t of course been serious. In three minutes I would be out of his mind walking handsomely towards the plane with his briefcase.

  “When shall I see you?”

  “The children go back on Wednesday. I could manage Thursday.” Over a week.

  “We’ll go to Brighton for the day.” What would I tell Tim? “I’ll pick you up outside Baker Street Station at 9.30. The Marylebone Road entrance. Liz?”

  “Mm.”

  “What are you wearing?”

  I looked in the mirror. The yellow duster was hanging out of my overall pocket and I was still in my slippers. I had no make-up on, my hair was all over the place and my nose shiny. Had I been my own daily help I would have given my self the sack.

  “A white dress.” It was partly true.

  “I can picture you. I’ll take the snapshot with me.” No wonder they fell for him like ninepins.

  “Dobbie, I love you,” I said.

  “What’s that? The loudspeaker was going.”

  “I said have a good weekend.”

  “Thanks, Liz. I’ll see you on Thursday; 9.30.”

  He didn’t care that there were six interminable days to live through. Probably hadn’t even counted them.

  “’Bye.”

  He replaced his receiver and I held on to mine staring at it as if Dobbie would reappear like the genie from the lamp. The dialling tone burped rudely and I put the receiver back in its cradle.

  By the time I had finished the upstairs I was hot and cross and tired and, looking out at the sunshine, resentful, but no longer peeved at Mrs Mac. Instead I regarded her as an absolute heroine to do all that tedious work every single day of the week and resolved not to carp at her any more even if she did skip the odd corner.

  The white dress was dusty at the hem where the overall didn’t cover it and I felt dusty all over. I undressed and took a shower, not bothering to clean it, I’d done it once, so really I might not have troubled, and put on a beach dress I had worn in Italy and gold-thonged sandals. I felt cool and comfortable and better, and brushed my hair off my face and decided I really looked quite young and put on pink lipstick and sun-filter cream and just a little mascara and went down to prepare the rest of the picnic and do the vegetables and make some sort of dessert for the evening.

  At 12.30 when I took out the picnic basket the children were still motionless on the rug. I thought they’ll get sunstroke and then no they wouldn’t because children never did get any of the things you always said they would, like colds when they got their feet wet and didn’t change their socks or tummy-aches from eating oranges and milk.

  They sat up reluctantly then bustled about when they saw the picnic basket and they were brown from Italy and really nice-looking kids and I suddenly felt lucky and happy and at peace and at their disposal like the calm and contented mothers in the family magazines.

  Nine

  The mood lasted all through lunch during which we played Twenty Questions, and Knock-Knock Who’s There? taking me back to my own childhood, although Robin and Diana swore they had invented it, and Geography Endings at which they beat me.

  They helped me clear away and got their swimming things without any fuss, Diana not even having to turn the house upside down for her cap. We had the roof off the car and switched on the radio and sang to the music all the way to the pool.

  I didn’t go in to help them undress. I hated the disinfectant smell of the changing-rooms and the soggy floors and the laundry boxes you had to put your clothes in, and exchanged for a numbered disc to pin to your swimsuit, and the middle-aged women attendants defeated by life calling ‘come along now dear’ to someone every minute of the day.

  Outside by the pool it was hot and sunny, people lying around on towels and laughing and diving and kids screaming and you could believe you were on the Continent because of the sun. I put on my dark glasses and sat down on the grass verge near the kiddies’ pool, where the tiny tots were paddling on fat legs, and listened to other Mums shouting at their children and from my serenity pitied them.

  Robin and Diana came out in their swimsuits and gave me their watches to keep and their towels and I helped Diana with her cap which was always difficult to get on over her long hair and they were away threatening to push each other into the water.

  It was more restful than Kew really. I suppose everything has its compensations, and it wasn’t at all unpleasant just relaxing in the sun instead of trailing through the hot-houses gazing at bananas and giant water-lilies and thinking you couldn’t survive another moment. I wasn’t worried about the children in the pool because they were both good swimmers. I had taken them both through two miserable winters every Tuesday night after school in the dark to the Municipal baths where with scarlet floats round their arms they had progressed from clinging tearfully to the side of the bath to swimming like little fishes in the deep end. Stretching my legs in front of me, I hadn’t repainted my toe-nails since Italy and they needed doing, I leaned back on my hands and put my face up to the sun which made everything look so different. In its embrace I felt like Lollabrigida and Bardot and Loren, and wished Dobbie were there to see me, and capable of anything. Dobbie not Tim;
I was afraid Tim would shatter the moment by saying teatime or I wouldn’t say no to a drink. He liked to eat and drink on time while I could let hours go by not caring or eat at any time according to my mood. Of course it wasn’t Tim’s fault and dated, I knew, from his prisoner-of-war days when there just wasn’t anything to eat except some thin soup and rice if they were lucky and they’d sit and think of all the eating and drinking they were going to do when they came home. Often when I watched him carving the roast on Sundays I’d think of him in his P.O.W. clothes, weighing six stone as he had when they released him, and standing behind barbed wire, dreaming of this moment. I often wondered if he appreciated it now that it was here, thanked God every time he sat down to a meal. When I asked him he said he couldn’t live in the past and he hardly ever thought about those days, they were bad enough at the time, and he had no desire to relive them. I often thought about them though and tried to put myself behind the barbed wire in the abysmal conditions with not enough to eat. Try as I would I simply could not feel anything, any more than Tim could feel what it was like having a baby from my inadequate description. It wasn’t only Tim, I knew, but thousands and thousands of others who had suffered even worse privations. It didn’t help when Tim explained that there was no sum total of human suffering but each man could only suffer so much for himself and that was the limit of human endurance. I thought you must remember the past, hang on to it so that you didn’t make the same mistake again. Tim said no, you must go forward; in the future lay hope.

  I felt my nose burning and opened my eyes to get the sun-filter cream from my bag. There was a man sitting on the wall in swimming trunks, beautifully muscular and tanned, with a gold chain round his neck, and black glasses. He was looking in my direction and I thought that would be funny picked up at the local swimming pool, me, then I noticed he wasn’t looking at me exactly but at my left ear and I turned round and just behind me there was an au-pair so brown she was almost black, with one of those inflated figures swelling scornfully out of an inadequate black bikini. I found the cream and spread it slowly over my face feeling matronly and that I had never at any time looked like that, not even at seventeen. I looked again to make quite sure he wasn’t staring at me and of course he wasn’t. I was another Mum looking after children in the pool; a depersonalised fragment of the crowd. I took another glance at the girl and saw that her hair was long and wet and guessed that she had swum the pool like a mermaid, hair floating, scornful of caps and keeping your set dry and other such mundane matters that complicated my life.

  I shaded my eyes. Robin and Diana were fighting in the pool, beneath the diving-boards, and I shouted “Robin; Diana!” anxiously, hysterically, like all the others. Jennifer! Hilary! Come here! Tell Peter! Come out this minute! They didn’t hear me. It wasn’t surprising with the noise of the water and the screaming. They were struggling together like little porpoises. I think Robin was trying to take Diana’s swimming cap off. I went to the edge of the pool and waved and Robin seeing me waved back, one hand still grabbing Diana, and I signalled that I wanted them to come out and went back to where I had left my bag.

  They came dripping, panting like puppies. I pushed at their legs saying careful you’re making me all wet. Robin’s nose was running and I told him and he wiped it with the back of his hand. They stood there shivering and said what do you want? I said I won’t have this horse-play, it’s dangerous, if you want to swim, swim, but leave each other alone. Diana said Robin started it, he wanted my cap. Robin said, liar, you tried to pull me under. They both said I didn’t and I said if there’s any more argument you can come out and get dressed, listening to myself being angry. They looked at each other and went back to the pool and I moved away from the puddle they had left on the grass. I knew that they had only been playing and that they weren’t really in any danger. The thing would have worked itself out. I was unable to prevent myself though from making the conventional response, from hauling them out of the water and giving them a telling-off the general lines of which were so familiar to all of us I doubt if they even heard. They just waited until it was over so that they could get back into the pool. In ten minutes they were back, hungry and holding their hands out for money for the snack-bar.

  “You’ve only just had lunch,” I said.

  Robin held his stomach and rolled his eyes. “I’m starving.”

  “So am I,” Diana said.

  “Pass my bag, then.”

  He opened it and looked in, dripping all over the contents.

  “I said pass it.”

  “I was looking for your purse.”

  “No-one told you to look for it. I do wish you’d listen. What do you want?”

  “Coca-Cola and a Bandit and a lolly and a packet of crisps.”

  “Me too.”

  “That’s far too much.”

  “I’m starving.”

  “So am I.”

  I took out a two-shilling piece and gave it to Diana. “You can have this between you.”

  “You can’t get hardly anything,” Diana said.

  “Well it’s not tea-time and you’ve only just had lunch.”

  “Make it half a dollar,” Robin said.

  “If you’re going to argue you can’t have anything at all.”

  They went off towards the snack-bar, jog-trotting. The man with the chain round his neck was looking at me now. I suppose he was enjoying the hackneyed little scene. I was wrong, I knew. I had made no attempt to put myself in their situation, hungry from the pool. Once again, from Olympian heights, I had treated them as children. Children they were but people too. One forgot too often. It was easier to forget. I was not alone. It should be called having ‘people’ really, not having children at all. Perhaps then one would be more prepared. It would not come with so much of a shock, the realisation that they had minds, thoughts, feelings of their own; one would not pigeon-hole their little doings into lumpish categories. Having a baby sounded cute; a bundle wrapped in a blanket. Having a person implied something more serious. Should we not reflect more? Two, three, or four extra persons round the house each with a personality to be cultivated was an undertaking, needed consideration. We did not consider. We had them, babies, and ignored their demands, not to be fed and clothed, but to be treated as human beings with equal rights, as long as possible. We presupposed a love and affection that we imagined came built-in with the relationship; were surprised to discover it was not implicit. True, mothers had their maternal instinct, if there was such a thing, to help them. With fathers it came more hard. Before the war, if fathers were wealthy they kept their offspring insulated in the nursery; at the other end of the scale they saw equally little of them, coming home only to sleep. The cataclysm, which had swept away Nannies and nursemaids, save for the few extant in Kensington Gardens, had thrown up a new father-child relationship. Their company was forced upon each other. It was good to see them together in the parks on a Sunday morning or engrossed in the finer points of the workings of an electric railway. The ramifications spread wider, however, than that.

  When Robin and Diana were young, at the crawling stage or toddling, Tim had played with them, given them rides on his shoulders, bathed them on many occasions, helped me put them to bed. He was a good father. He liked talking to Robin, man talk, to Diana about her school-work, current affairs which she didn’t seem able to grasp, busy with her idols. The trouble was that now when he had finished with them they could no longer be tucked up tidily in bed. They hung around. You had company when you wished to be quiet. They had their own rooms, record players, desks, armchairs, everything, but when Tim came home they wanted to be with him. Sometimes the sight of Diana slopping around, no shoes, face plastered with theatrical make-up, drove him to distraction. I defended them, pleading they were people, individuals in their own rights. I knew I was just as bad.

  My earlier mood of well-being had vanished. The ground was hard but there was nothing to sit on. I was fed up with the pool and wished I was back in the garden where I
had a siesta chair which supported your legs and gave you the impression you were floating, suspended comfortably, in mid-air.

  The children came back, sucking Coca-Cola through straws, and a packet of crisps each and a penny change. I said shall we go and they looked horrified and said we’ve only just come and I knew I was there for what remained of the afternoon.

  By the time we got home it was five o’clock. Olga had turned up with Rosanna who at thirteen was a little stunner, and with her hair done up in a dough-nut and developing figure and South-of-France bikini looked years older than Diana instead of six months. We had spent the afternoon gossiping while the children swam. Olga told me amongst other things that Dick Howland, whom we all knew, had run off with a divorcée who ran a boutique in Sloane Street, and left poor Margery with three children and another on the way. It was interesting because the legend that went with the Howlands was that they were one big happy family and they always seemed to be enjoying themselves en masse and Dick and Margery never dumped the children on to grandparents and went away or anything like that.

  When I’d unlocked the front door Robin and Diana streaked through into the garden to put themselves under the hose, as if they hadn’t had enough water for one day, and dumped the bag with the wet swimming things on the hall carpet. I picked it up and sorted out the things, putting the towels into the machine for the morning, rinsing out the costumes and Diana’s hat and putting the bag into the cupboard. Listening to the screams from under the hose I put the kettle on, had a wash while it boiled, and came down to make a cup of coffee and start on dinner.

  I was standing over the cooker when Tim arrived. He put his arms round me and kissed the back of my neck and smelled hot and of the City.

  “It’s certainly been a scorcher,” he said, loosening his tie and taking his coat off. “What did you do?”

  “Took the kids swimming.”

  “Lucky. Did you go in?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  I didn’t know. I liked swimming well enough in the Mediterranean, on holiday, although it was a thing I didn’t do particularly well. I wouldn’t dream of taking off my things and joining the children in the local pool. The mothers sat by and watched; by tradition.