The Commonplace Day

by Rosemary Friedman

  “One wouldn’t know, looking at you; you and Tim.”

  “I didn’t say we weren’t happy. I feel I have an infinite and untapped capacity for love.”

  “Prove it.” His eyes were over mine.

  “Are you angry, because I’m dallying?”

  “You can dally as long as you like; provided it’s not too long.”

  I was aware at that moment that I had everything; a husband who loved me and whom I loved; two very good children, a lover with whom I was as yet innocent at my command.

  I was surprised when Dobbie said it was time we went back for lunch. Absorbed with him I had been unaware of the general exodus around us. Our bank of pebbles was deserted. He stood up, back to the sea and sun, and held out his hand to pull me up. I stumbled on the stones and was in his arms, wishing my mind was as deserted as the shore, empty of Hazelbank and all it represented.

  We wandered back to the hotel like lovers and I went to the ladies’ room to wash. With horror I looked at myself reflected in the peach-glass mirror and doubted my ability to convince Tim I’d achieved my sunburned nose in Knightsbridge. I applied make-up which took off some of the shine and thought it looked not too bad.

  Dobbie was in the bar, sherry and black olives waiting, and said where have you been?

  “Trying to do something about my nose.”

  “It looks all right to me.”

  “Tim will wonder where I caught the sun.”

  Dobbie offered the olives and I thought Tim’s favourites then don’t be a bore Dobbie doesn’t want to be constantly reminded of Tim. I noticed the women, the young ones particularly, looking twice at Dobbie and curiously at me.

  “You must have a fabulous time abroad,” I said.

  “In what way?”

  “Women.”

  “I work sometimes.”

  “Not in the evenings.”

  “It’s often quite dreary in the evenings; particularly the Iron Curtain countries; feather beds and mushrooms on the bathroom ceilings.”

  “No beautiful comrade?”

  “None.”

  “My heart bleeds. What about Catherine?”

  “What about her?”

  “She’s very beautiful.” I felt depressed.

  He refused to be drawn.

  “What age do you like them best?”

  “Your age.”

  “No seriously.”

  “I am being serious.”

  I sighed knowing I would never know and agreed with Dobbie that we should eat.

  After lunch we sat on the terrace and I remembered I hadn’t telephoned Tim.

  “Why do you have to ring him?” Dobbie said from behind his black glasses.

  “I always do, or he rings me if I’m at home.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “We always have done.”

  “Any luck, darling?” Tim said.

  “With what?”

  “The suit.”

  “No. Not yet, that is. You were probably right, it is a little too early.”

  “Never mind. I’m glad you phoned. Look, Liz. Burrington and Charlton-Jones have just flown in from New York about this merger and I want them to get together with Maxwell Murray. I think I shall have to dine them tonight.”

  I looked at the receiver.

  “Sorry, darling,” Tim said. “They just called me from the airport.”

  I was trying to work things out.

  “Why don’t you ring up Mrs Lockhart to sit, and go to a film with Martha and Jack, Thursday’s their night, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes, they usually go on Thursdays.”

  “Sorry, but it can’t be helped.”

  “Don’t worry.”

  “I hope you find your suit.”

  “I’m sure I shall.”

  “Don’t overdo it.”

  “No.”

  “See you tonight then, darling.”

  “Yes.”

  I had the rest of the day for Dobbie. I told him and he took my hand.

  “You aren’t fed up with me?” I asked.

  “You know you’re my girl; you always have been.”

  “I wonder what would happen if your bluff was called.”

  “Sit down and have your coffee.”

  “In a moment.”

  “Where to now?”

  “I have to phone Mrs Lockhart.”

  Eleven

  That was September and it was now November. Four months had passed between the thought and the deed.

  By the end of the day that had started at Baker Street Station and ended at the Four Hundred via Brighton I felt stimulated, live and young again as I hadn’t done for years. At the Four Hundred we saw one of our leading film stars with her hair a foot high and elfin face smudged with enormous eyes. You could well believe the tales that her toilette took her took her two and a half hours to complete. Her companion, screen and life, wore make-up too, giving him a bronze glow which owed nothing to the great outdoors, and paid court with much flashing of inch-square golden cuff-links. For an entire day I hadn’t cooked or thought of meals, chased dirt, except on my face, or admonished the children. I gave myself over to Dobbie who said what we were to do, smoothed every path, and anticipated my needs with solicitude.

  It was perhaps a mistake to go up to his flat after Brighton but at the time I did not really think. My dress wasn’t suitable for the evening. I should have gone home to change but Dobbie said it would do. It was after all still summer and you could just get away with print.

  While Dobbie showered I roamed round his bedroom with its snow leopard rug and French patterned wallpaper. He had opened his cupboard to get his fresh shirt and left it open and he must have had at least four dozen shirts all terribly tidy and new-looking from Sulka’s. The ties were neat too, each one neatly rolled. I imagined him doing them meticulously before he went to bed, putting his shoes in trees, there was a pair under the chair, trees in his slippers too. His suits, all weights, hung regimented, shoulder to shoulder, as if he had a valet to care. I thought what an absolute blessing he’d be to any wife.

  The bed was covered with purple linen piped with white and a white bed-head against a blue wall. I sat on it wallowing in the luxury, not of Dobbie’s flat but of having a lover, in name at any rate. I enjoyed a feeling of opulence as if Liz Westbury had taken on a new existence outside her ordinary self.

  I could hear him splashing about in the shower and lay back against the white cushion, drowsy after the Brighton sun, and thought with detachment what if this was my wedding night, comparing it with the other. The detachment was significant. Regarding my relationship with Dobbie I felt omniscient, clear-sighted, and mistress of myself. With Tim I had been confused, love and sentiment and physical desire undistinguishable one from the other. Now I knew what to expect; then I had only a hazy idea. I was no longer a girl and felt myself to be unshockable, no modesty to defend.

  Alone with Tim on the first night of our honeymoon in Cornwall I had been bewildered by fatigue, engendered by the wedding and its foregoing hectic weeks, by a certain shyness brought about by anticipation of the unknown, by a host of fleeting and conflicting requirements. They had to do, at the same time, with the wish to be respected and violated, ravaged with no loss of dignity, subjugated yet preserved. I had closed my eyes and given myself to Tim. I was fortunate in my choice of husband. He knew what he was doing; I did not. If we pleased each other it was by chance, instinct perhaps. With Dobbie I would be in complete command of my senses, allowing them freedom or pulling on the reins at will. My relationship with Tim as far as sex was concerned had not been unsuccessful; from my new standpoint, the years making me what I was, I wanted to try another.

  Looking at the ceiling, the faintest wash of blue, I was surprised at my own unmuddled thinking; aware of a feeling of joyous excitement in the knowledge that Dobbie was within splashing distance and the ennui of my normal routine both out of sight and almost out of mind. I knew it was an evasion, that thi
s was not my life, but I aided and abetted myself in the deception that I was master of my fate and capable of anything.

  With how many women, I wondered, had Dobbie made love on this bed? I pictured them afterwards, smoking, Dobbie with his lazy eyes. How would I measure up, beyond my prime, with the young ones, the Catherines; did they know what it was all about? And what of Dobbie? Gentle, tender, clumsy, brutal, rapacious? One could not always go by looks.

  He came out of the shower in a white bath-robe, rubbing the back of his neck with a towel, and smelling of soap and after-shave. I sat up, relinquishing with reluctance my day-dream, and he sat down beside me. I had things to say but I didn’t say them because I was in his arms and rolling over and thinking nice and what the hell then no not now I wasn’t ready. I pulled away and stood up and he lit a cigarette and I laughed because I’d thought of him doing that afterwards and he said:

  “What’s funny?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You aren’t by any chance leading me up the garden?”

  I shook my head not laughing any more.

  “What are we waiting for then?”

  I couldn’t explain that it was my upbringing getting in the way. It seemed so horribly crude to fall into bed with Dobbie without a suitable period of courtship although there was nothing to court and I’d known him all my life.

  “Sorry to be difficult.”

  “I didn’t mean to rush you. You looked lovely there on the bed.”

  “You know what’s so nice,” I said. “We know none of the irritating things about each other. I don’t know if you leave puddles in the bathroom, your dirty socks on the floor, you don’t know what I’m like first thing in the morning.”

  He fastened his watch, the cigarette in his mouth.

  “Does it matter?”

  He meant it. His world was different to mine.

  “Yes, it does.”

  I picked up my handbag.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To find out about the puddles.”

  When I came back, I felt refreshed. I’d found Numero Cinq toilet water on the white shelf against the black-painted wall and promised myself not to ask whose it was. Dobbie was dressed in a dark suit. He was looking out of the window.

  “Sure you want to go out?”

  “Sure.”

  He put his arms round me. “Don’t make it too long.”

  He didn’t know how close I was, touched by his tenderness, to making it then.

  We danced all night. Until 11.30 at any rate. At the next table was a party of four; a Spanish woman, older than I, very beautiful, terribly gay, with a Don Juan of a husband, six foot tall and grey moustached, two handsome, elegant sons. They danced, the sons with the mother, kissing her when they escorted her back, the husband cheek-to-cheek with his vivacious wife. They drank champagne. At eleven o’clock the father handed over some money to the eldest son, and the boys, laughing, confident in their elegant looks, suits, kissed the mother on both cheeks and left. Alone with their father, the woman, hair drawn back from fine, olive cheekbones, was no less loving, gay.

  The charade depressed me.

  “What’s the matter, Liz?” Dobbie said.

  I smiled. “Nothing.” I could not have explained even to myself.

  We danced.

  There were elderly men with pert, shiny little girls, ageing women with smooth young men, handsome couples plumbing the depths of each other’s eyes, nibbling ears.

  When I got home it was midnight. There was Diana’s beret in the hall and her music case which I picked up and went slowly up the stairs.

  Tim was reading in bed with just the bedside lamp on so I hoped he wouldn’t notice my sunburned face. He hadn’t taken the bed-cover off, I usually did it, but must just have rolled it back and now it was in a heap on the floor. He said you’re awfully late, darling, I was getting worried. I said sorry, I decided to stay in town to see that film with Audrey Hepburn, the weepy one you didn’t want to see. He said alone and I said yes, my face in the bed-cover which I was folding. He said you hate going anywhere alone, why didn’t you ring Martha and Jack? I said well I was just by the cinema so I thought I might as well.

  He was excited about his merger and he told me about it while I undressed. How it was going to be quite something if it came off and what Maxwell Murray had said over the lobster. I took quite a long time taking my face off and going over the wonderful day with Dobbie. I wasn’t really paying any attention to what he was saying until I realised it was quiet and he had put down his book and stopped talking. I said, frightened suddenly, Tim what’s the matter? He said nothing, hurry up and come to bed.

  We didn’t go to Brighton again. The weather started to break up after that first time. I took to meeting Dobbie in town for lunch a couple of times a week. On the Wednesday after Brighton we went to Leoni’s in Soho. Sitting at the next table was Archie Tindall. I wasn’t surprised because I knew that sooner or later it was bound to happen. I was under the impression that Archie leered at me but since that was his permanent expression I wasn’t sure. He knew Dobbie of course. We all had a little chat then Archie went back to his table and the man with whom he was lunching.

  I knew I should have to tell Tim, Archie wasn’t one for keeping anything to himself. I ran into Dobbie today in town, I said, he took me out to lunch. Don’t tell me he does his shopping at Liberty’s, Tim said. No, I was crossing Davies Street and he came by in the car. Haven’t seen much of him lately, Tim said, why don’t you ask him for dinner? He’s going away next week, I said, when he comes back. Olga of course tried to make something of it.

  “Darling, what on earth’s going on?” she said when I met her in the fishmonger’s. “Do tell!”

  I looked suitably innocent.

  “You and Dobbie. Archie said you were terribly tête-à-tête.”

  I laughed. “You know Dobbie. He’s always around.”

  “I’ve always thought him an absolute dish,” Olga said. “I wish he’d come and hang around our house. Does he take you out much?”

  “Don’t be silly.” I examined my shopping list. “Do you think they’ve any lemon soles?”

  “Still waters,” Olga said. “I won’t breathe a word to Tim.”

  “About the lunch?” I said. “Tim knows.”

  Olga looked disappointed.

  “Anyway don’t be ridiculous.”

  “You’ve looked different lately,” Olga said. “Radiant.”

  “There’re some over there.”

  “What?”

  “Lemon soles.”

  “You don’t have to worry about me. I’m the soul of discretion.” Soul and soles.

  “For heaven’s sake, Olga!” Not everyone’s like you, I wanted to say. I went to ask the fishmonger in his white apron and rubber boots about the lemon soles and thought that perhaps they were, only to a lesser or greater degree.

  She was looking at me speculatively over the slab and I could see that out of everybody Olga guessed.

  Dobbie telephoned every morning. We talked about nothing in particular for a long time. He went to Italy and then to Spain. Robin caught the bug that was going round and had a week in bed. Suddenly it was November.

  I’d seen him last on Wednesday. We’d had lunch and walked round a freezing park.

  “This is ridiculous,” Dobbie said.

  “I’ll come up to the flat next week.” I hadn’t been there since Brighton.

  He stopped walking and looked at me.

  “You mean it?”

  I nodded. “I thought perhaps it would wear itself out. It’s got worse.”

  He held me terribly close and I thought ridiculous, two middle-aged people in overcoats. I couldn’t laugh off or ridicule the desperate need I had of Dobbie.

  He dropped me off where I’d parked my car and said: “Wednesday afternoon at the flat then, Liz. I can’t manage lunch. I’ll pick you up here at two.”

  ‘Here’ was a bomb-site car park where there was alway
s room mid-week. I hated meeting Dobbie in restaurants. We’d found this place which had become our rendezvous and as I drove up I was always relieved to find the broad nose of the Mercedes waiting outside.

  “You’ll ring me tomorrow?”

  “I’m going to Czechoslovakia. First thing on Tuesday.”

  The week had crawled by. Yesterday he’d rung and said all right for tomorrow Liz?

  “More than all right,” I said. I couldn’t think beyond it.

  I waited all day for something to happen as you always did with a home and children and you’d planned anything. Nothing went wrong. Mrs Mac seemed fit and Ted was in work and behaving and the children came home without any aches or pains.

  I looked at Tim sitting in the armchair with the evening newspaper and said in my head I’ve been deceiving you for weeks and tomorrow afternoon I’m going to be unfaithful to you. He saw me looking at him and looked up at me and smiled. I smiled back, brazen enough even for that.

  Now that the day had actually arrived I felt neither like a social outcast nor terribly wicked. I had lived with the thought for so long that the deed was all but technically committed. I wasn’t sure whether I regarded the adultery as a beginning or as an end. All I was certain of was that it was something I was in desperate need of to give my life, which lately had become meaningless, meaning. Where it would stop and if, what was to be the future tenor of my relationship with Dobbie, I refused to consider. I wanted to make love with him, wildly, savagely.

  Twelve

  I didn’t really think I was going to be able to concentrate on a dress for Pamela Talbot’s wedding on this day of days but there was time was to try at least one shop before I had to meet Martha.

  The clothes business was a game; sometimes I hated it intensely. Living in the village and being the wife of an accountant imposed certain social obligations. Life was punctuated by a series of evenings which presupposed clothes for the job; if you were the guest that was. If you were the hostess it presupposed a great deal more. It started generally with “Isn’t it time we had some people?” demanded casually of Tim; sometimes it emanated from Tim himself, “Liz, we ought to ask the so-and-so’s.” It wasn’t difficult, viewed, casually dressed, from one’s armchair, a dream hostess gracious and perfect from whom the guests would drift singing one’s praises. In reality it was an uphill grind starting with the invitations on the telephone, the unimportant ones leaping at it and the vital planets in the galaxy uncertain. You weren’t sure then whether to call the whole thing off, for another day, or carry on until you were too committed and all you could do was hope. The component parts in order, more or less, the next step was to set about turning one’s home into a palace, oneself into a queen. There were lists; scraps of paper, losing themselves all over the house, having to do with cocktail cherries and so many bridge rolls and extra pastry forks from Martha. The lists became translated with time into laden cardboard boxes in the kitchen; from the greengrocer’s with tomatoes and radishes and cucumber; from the grocer’s with anchovies and pickled onions and coffee sugar; and into silver from the cupboard where it was put away in polythene and into paper serviettes and into doilies. The silver, the linen, the glass; flowers to be arranged, would they open too soon in the central heating? Little dishes with peppermint creams, jellies, nuts; cigarettes and ashtrays; olives, cheese straws, potato crisps. The lampshades should have been washed, I’d been meaning to; a broken cup, one of the best; rain and mud on the hall carpet on the day. Was it worth it? What are you going to so much trouble for, Tim said, just because Olga does? If you’re doing it you have to do it properly. Everything ready. Mrs Mac with a long face because of the extra work casting a shadow; Tim and the children helping themselves to sweets, to nuts, disturbing the cushions. The desire to run.