The Commonplace Day

by Rosemary Friedman

  “I just didn’t.”

  “You’d have been the belle of pool.”

  He meant it. I thought of the girl in the black bikini. I should have been glad that Tim still thought me as attractive as when we had met. Perversely I wasn’t.

  “I’m going to shower.” He said that every hot night.

  Then I’ll have a drink.

  “Then I’ll have a drink.”

  He lifted the lid of the saucepan.

  “It’s only potatoes.”

  “I love you. Get the ice out, honey.”

  How many women had husbands who loved them after seventeen years? I tried to make it mean something, to let it envelop me. It did nothing to fill the need that was inside me. Need for what? For Dobbie? I opened the great fridge with the light that went on inside, not knowing.

  “Pity about Kew,” Tim said over the fried veal. “You’ll have to go another day.”

  “Go back to school next week,” Robin said.

  “What have you been doing with yourselves all day?”

  “Nothing,” Diana said smartly.

  “Mummy took you to the pool.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, that’s not nothing.”

  “Mummy already told you we went to the pool.”

  “It’s still not nothing.”

  “I didn’t say it was. You knew, though.”

  “Sociable lot,” Tim said.

  I could see he was getting irritated. “Bring some bread,” I said to Diana. “I forgot to put it on the table.”

  She got up. She had changed into a blue cotton skirt and T-shirt and looked fresh and pretty.

  “Where are your shoes?” Tim said.

  “Oh Daddy!”

  “How many times have I told you?”

  She walked towards the kitchen.

  “Put them on!” Tim bellowed.

  “Tim!”

  Diana came back and felt under the table, looking sulky.

  “It’s too hot for shoes.”

  “Don’t argue. It only takes a moment to get something in your foot.”

  She sat down.

  “Your mother asked you to get the bread.”

  Diana rolled her eyes. “Oh glory!” She got up.

  “And don’t be impertinent!”

  She made a face at Robin on the way to the door to save her own.

  We were left with the fried veal which was nice but which I knew Tim was not now enjoying, and an atmosphere. Tim had not meant to upset Diana any more than Diana had intended to be rude to her father. It was always the way though. They couldn’t be together for more than a few minutes without rubbing each other up the wrong way. It was laughable when you thought what enlightened parents we had made up our minds to be.

  Diana came back with the bread which no-one wanted and sat down sulkily and Tim put down his knife and fork half-way through the veal and said it was too hot and that made me cross because it was hotter still cooking it and that left just Robin unperturbed in the private world of his own he always lived in.

  Tim told me why he had wanted Maxwell Murray’s telephone number. A big deal was about to go through but at the moment it was all terribly hush-hush. It seemed aeons ago since the morning when I had given the number to him thinking it was Dobbie on the phone and I didn’t really understand what was supposed to be going on anyway.

  When we’d finished and cleared away we settled in the sitting-room with the French windows open on to the garden which was getting brown from lack of rain and which Tim said he was going to water.

  Diana was sprawled out on the floor with the Daily Express, reading the Gambols which was about all she ever read of the newspaper, and Robin was glued to the TV Times to see what was on.

  “Did you hear about Margery Howland?” Tim said. “Dick’s pushed off and left her with three kids and one in the oven.”

  “Yes. Olga told me.”

  “We always quote them. Happy family and all that.”

  “You can never tell,” I said.

  “People’s marriages seem to be breaking up right and left. Look at the ones we know married about the same time as us.”

  “It must be the dangerous age,” I laughed.

  “I thought it was seven years, the itch, not seventeen.”

  “Have you had many itches?”

  Tim laughed. “The odd moment. Don’t we all?”

  He picked up the two evening papers he always brought in with him and handed me one.

  I read the headline, a split in the Labour Party, they were always having splits, then turned to the ‘Diary’. There had been a party on somebody’s yacht with a list of ‘names’ a yard long and peaches flown in from California. Half London’s population was in Scotland and the other half had been at the River Room last night where the theme of Lord Mitcham’s twenty-first birthday fancy-dress party had been Midsummer Night’s Dream. The Lord Chancellor had gone as Bottom and the Honourable Miss Lavinia (Boo) Graham as Hermia and the American ambassador’s wife as Titania. Everyone had had caviare and sole véronique and pheasant from his lordship’s estate and an absolutely fabulous time while I had been sitting in the morning room with Tim, after Dobbie had gone, watching a poor instalment of The Avengers and putting a patch in Robin’s trousers.

  Ten

  It seemed that Thursday was never going to come. On Wednesday with a hallelujah of relief I got the children back to school not minding for once the pre-breakfast trauma nor clearing in their wake the trail of holiday clutter they left behind. Mrs Mac was back with a bandage round her knee and full of grumbles but coping and I did the morning chores then went off to the hairdresser’s to get my hair done for Dobbie.

  I knew most of the women in the hairdresser’s. It was a pretty regular clientèle and quite a fashion parade, stunning little dresses or suits, and lovely legs in lovely stockings, and gorgeous handbags and sun-glasses and poodles. Many of them had just come back from somewhere and others were just off or even the same ones having their hair done in between. Martin and Jack and Stanley who lived in Ealing or Blackheath or Notting Hill back-combed with all their might and main, turning heads into golliwogs before smoothing them to elegance, and squirted clouds of lacquer and listened to tales of Majorca, Malta and Torremolinos. It was quite a club and some members attended every day to have their hair dressed. Lately they were tripping in with wigs in boxes to be cleaned and styled while their own hair was lifted and bleached and rinsed and tinted and anointed with everything from beer to eggs. Husbands thought that all you did in the hairdresser’s was to have it washed and set. It may have been like that once but now it was big business, an industry. Every other shop seemed to be a hairdressing salon with identical blown-up Italian pictures outside and pale green heads in the window and its selection of Mervins and Antoines and Pauls rolling away like mad. They were assisted by the Sandras and Brendas and Shirleys ranging from the genuinely pleasant to the downright petulant, gazing into space, and pondering on new shoes with pointed toes, their hands deep in lather. Heads waiting patiently over basins, blued or blacked, walked out two shades of mink or amber. My own hair was dark brown; a not bad colour with the odd grey hair here and there. I’d always determined not to go in for tinting. Apart from being expensive to keep up it took ages and once you were on the merry-go-round it was difficult to get off. I’d had flu though two years ago and when I recovered felt hideous. My face had got thin and my hair dull and Martin said why not a colour, it just needs a little lift? I needed more than that. I said all right just a rinse then to see. He said a rinse wouldn’t do anything to your hair it’s too dark. We’d have to give it an oil bleach first then a tint. I hummed and hahed and looked round the salon and everyone seemed to be going one colour or another and I felt stodgy and said all right. I went through agonies while they plastered it with white stuff, which prickled my scalp, then put me under the steamer, where I steamed, then gave me books to read and I thought they’d forgotten about me. They hadn’t though and kept comi
ng back to look and mutter and dry bits off. When I thought it was all over, I’d already been an hour and a half, it was time for the tint and I had to wait for that too. I thought my God what am I doing, but it was too late, and I submitted to the shampoo and set feeling as if I had been there for years. When I got home I was brightish red although I’d agreed to auburn but Martin said it was difficult to judge the first time. He could tone it down next week if I didn’t like it; more money. Tim said it was lovely, good old Tim, and I varied between hating myself for looking cheap and loving the new me on a good day. It didn’t end there though because the roots grew dark and looked dreadful and every week or so it was more bleach and tint and time and money and I understood where the platinum blondes in the Tatler who always looked so fabulous at St Moritz or Nassau spent their days. I decided that the upkeep was too much and that I would grow it out and go back to my natural colour. It took me a year and when it was back I hated it but was determined not to get involved again. I didn’t until Tim’s annual accountants’ ball and I had a new white dress and wanted to look stunning and in a weak moment allowed Martin to start all over again. I wasn’t red now but a kind of warm brown. That, I supposed, was how I was going to remain, with my touchings-up and ash-rinses when it went yellow and tints when it got too red. Like all the others, I was committed. Now, I said, I want it to look really good. Martin, steel comb poised, in shirt sleeves, tight trousers, and winkle-pickers with elevators on the heels, said “Going somewhere nice?” and I said yes, knowing he imagined a party, not a day in Brighton with my query lover.

  I watched him like a hawk and knew by the way he put the rollers in and was paying attention that it would look all right. I relaxed under the drier enjoying the freedom and the children being back at school and read about the dance in aid of Handicapped Children where everyone seemed to have stepped straight from Dior, and the Hunt Ball where they had never heard of him, and copied out a recipe for salmon mousse. He took a long time combing me out, impervious to the glares of the others waiting to be combed out or with wet heads. When he stepped back with the mirror I knew it was OK even if I did have to sleep on my nose.

  The difficulty was Tim. It would have been easier to be honest. There was no reason why I shouldn’t go to Brighton for the day with Dobbie but on the other hand there was no earthly reason why I should. I decided against the truth. Most of the shops have their autumn things in, I said, I shall be out all day, I’m going to look for a suit. In this weather, Tim said. Oh yes, there’s no point in waiting until it gets cold and everybody rushes. I’d rather go while there’s a selection. It was the evening that was going to be difficult. I doubted whether we should be back by four when I usually got back for the children. I gave Robin the key although Tim didn’t like me doing it, in case I was a bit late, and left everything ready for dinner, a casserole in the automatic oven and the rest to chance.

  In the morning I’d looked at Tim unsuspecting in his light-weight suit and he’d said have a good day and kissed me. I loved him more than ever and knew that he must never find out and hurried them all out of the house and got ready for Brighton.

  It was ages since I’d been on a tube train, going everywhere by car. I felt that I didn’t belong and that everyone was looking at me but I suppose I was just excited. My heel got caught in the escalator and the wind hurtling down the corridors blew my beautiful hair out of place and I was sure brought smuts with it. I went to the Ladies at Baker Street to tidy up. I smiled at myself in the tiny mirror of my compact and then went up the steps in my light dress, my coat over my arm, to meet Dobbie.

  He was waiting at the top of the steps in his green Mercedes. For one moment I thought of Tim at the office and the children and that I was behaving like a tart, Brighton and all that, then Dobbie leaned over and opened the door and took my coat and said hallo Liz and I thought don’t be ridiculous.

  It was nice to be in a sports car. It was the sort of thing Tim and I had always wanted but of course with children to put in the back and luggage at holiday times it was quite impractical. Housewives’ Choice was on the radio and I was usually pottering around at home instead of stopping and starting in the traffic, the streets chock-a-block with cars and taxis and lorries and buses. We didn’t say much listening to the music for Mrs Jones of Sidcup and Maureen and Arthur in the Isle of Wight and Mrs Hathaway in hospital in Dorking. Acutely aware of Dobbie next to me, I put back the clock, dreaming I was single again, that anything was possible. It was surprising how easy it was, momentarily at any rate, to set so many years, so much, at nought.

  At Haywards Heath we stopped and took the roof off and I was glad I’d remembered a scarf to tie round my head. Dobbie looked at me with approval and kissed me and I felt terribly happy and the mood prevailed all the way to Brighton.

  We parked outside the Metropole between a maroon Rolls and a black and went in for coffee. Had I been with Tim and the kids it would have been straight to the beach and elevenses on the pebbles. Coffee in a silver pot out on the terrace seemed terribly civilised.

  “Where’s your next trip?” I asked Dobbie, really wanting to know when.

  “Russia, the end of next week, via Prague and Warsaw. I dislike Russia. From the plumbing up it’s depressing.”

  “I’d like to go; jump out of my rut.”

  “You’ve just been to Italy.”

  “We went last year. I’d like to go somewhere different, San Francisco, Japan, somewhere really far away.”

  Dobbie stubbed out his cigarette. “Wasn’t it Proust who said it’s better to see one place with a hundred eyes than a hundred different places with one pair of eyes?”

  “I wouldn’t know.” I wouldn’t. I had stayed on into the sixth form at school but hadn’t been bright enough for Higher Schools as we called it then. I had been introduced to Proust but had stuck fast a third of the way through Volume I of Remembrance of Things Past, finding Swann an incalculable bore and knowing I would never get any further. Dobbie was very well up in that sort of thing. He could talk plays and literature with anyone although he had never had any higher education, going straight into business. He dabbled in Philosophy and spoke fluent French and German and Italian and read Racine in the original.

  “Proust is out of my depth,” I said, shutting my eyes against the sun. “Like Existentialism. I can never remember what it means.”

  “It’s a protest,” Dobbie said, “against the view that human beings are the helpless playthings of historical forces. A justification of the freedom and importance of the human personality. We are all, in other words, free.”

  “To do what?”

  “To choose. Our future is not altogether predictable.”

  Mine seemed to be mapped out. The gayness of the beginning of married life and the importance of maternity had faded. As a young girl there had always been something new; now there was Dobbie. I looked at him filling the cane chair yet not immobile, poised as if ready for flight to one of his far-away places. I knew that Tim, if he was pushed, could manage very well without me, the children would always be more or less ungrateful. I wanted to be wanted.

  Dobbie paid for the coffee and we left the car because we were coming back to the hotel for lunch and walked, free on a Thursday, towards the stony beach. We stumbled hand in hand over the pebbles and the men in braces with knotted handkerchiefs over their balding heads. Near a breakwater which was quiet we stopped and Dobbie lay back on the stones. I lay beside him with my head on his shoulder and wondered what would happen if somebody came by who knew me.

  “Are you going to sleep with me?” Dobbie said.

  It took me by surprise.

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know. There are certain mental hurdles to be overcome. You forget I’ve been a faithful wife for seventeen years.”

  He put a hand on my breast. “We could stay at the Metropole.”

  “I’d rather you didn’t rush me.”

  “You shouldn’t be so de
sirable.”

  “Am I?”

  “Doesn’t Tim tell you?”

  “Yes he does.” He knew me too well, loved me too well. With Dobbie I would be free.

  “You don’t love him then?”

  “I do; yes.”

  He waited.

  “It’s not Tim and I, Dobbie, it’s marriage. It’s not the best medium for love.”

  “You’d do away with it, then?”

  “I didn’t say that. There are great delights; besides, what about children?”

  “According to some, child-bearing is merely a purposeless and unjustifiable increase in the world’s population.”

  “Don’t you wish you had children?”

  “Occasionally. I’m too selfish. They take too much.”

  “I always wanted six. After Robin I realised it wasn’t children I wanted as much as to be with child. I keep getting great fat longings to be pregnant; to feel the wonderful, satisfying warmth of it. Of course you can’t just keep on.”

  “If I were married to you I would want a child.”

  “If you were married to me we wouldn’t be lying here. You’d be away and probably glad and I’d be at home washing your socks.”

  “What makes you think that things are going to be different with me?”

  “I am choosing you. There is no conqueror, no conquered.”

  “You chose Tim.”

  “In the beginning, yes. In the beginning things were all right. I don’t choose him afresh each time we make love though if we were free I probably would. It’s a silent rebellion.”

  “Against what?”

  “Two people shut up in a box with man as master.”

  “It sounds Victorian.”

  “It hasn’t changed. We drive cars, go out to work, sit on committees but it’s still the man who pays the piper, calls the tune.”

  “Someone has to.”

  “Do they? I think it leads to a cold war fought nightly beneath a million ceilings. We are not naturally perverse. You force us to be.”