The Commonplace Day

by Rosemary Friedman

“That’s not fair,” Martha said beginning to snivel.

  “Look, why don’t you girls make some coffee?” Tim said.

  “I think I’ll go home,” Martha said.

  “You can’t, darling. It’s foggy. You’d get lost. I’d have to send Dr Raus for you.”

  “That’s enough!”

  “I’m only teasing,” Jack said and went to sit next to Tim. “Have you a piece of paper? I’ll write something down for you. Ring your broker first thing in the morning.”

  Jack always had good tips. The trouble was that with the ones he passed on to Tim something always went wrong. From the horse’s mouth, he said, utterly hush-hush from someone on the board. We ended up with a scrap of paper every time he came. Nine out of ten Tim threw away. Ironically they’d prosper. The one he’d do something about would inevitably go astray.

  “I’ve had enough of your tips,” Tim said.

  “You’ll be sorry.” Jack flicked his moustache. You’ve your children to think of. This is right from the top.”

  “So was Cleveland United?”

  “That was unfortunate.”

  “And that Coventry firm. Bricks.”

  “Shoes. I’m only trying to help you.”

  “I know. Tell me what it is and I’ll see if I care for the sound.”

  “They’re only ten and threepence,” Jack said. “Buy a thousand in the morning. You’ll be grateful to me for this.”

  They had forgotten about Ellen Potter. She was taking it all in. I felt slightly ashamed. Thousands when I doubted if she had ten.

  “We’re going to make some coffee,” I said not wanting to leave her while Tim and Jack were talking in telephone numbers. “Would you like to come?”

  In the kitchen she said: “I won’t have any coffee, if you don’t mind. It keeps me awake.”

  “Me too,” Martha said. “Sometimes I can’t resist. I adore coffee and it just finishes me. I have to get up and take a pill but by that time I’m usually too far gone and just toss and turn till morning.”

  “Would you mind if I went to bed?” Ellen said.

  “Of course not. Would you like me to bring you some warm milk?”

  “No nothing at all, thanks. I enjoyed my supper, it was ever so nice. There is one thing.”

  “Yes?”

  “Could I have a glass for my teeth?”

  Upstairs I gave her a towel and showed her where everything was. I wasn’t sure whether I should offer a night-dress and thought because there had been no signs of one in Colchester Street, perhaps not. Martha disagreed. “Don’t be silly, darling, she’s a woman. Of course she’d like one even if she hasn’t got one at home. A hot bath too with lashings of Lentheric or whatever it is you use.”

  I ran the bath and Ellen Potter stood in the doorway clutching the nylon nightie.

  “It’ll be lovely having a hot bath,” she said, “I shan’t want to come out.”

  I told her not to lock the door and went down.

  “You were right,” I told Martha. “About the bath.”

  “I know I was. Because she doesn’t have all these things doesn’t mean to say she can’t appreciate them.”

  “Why doesn’t she want to stay here then?”

  “Independent, I suppose. At least she’s her own boss.”

  “I keep thinking of that ghastly room she lives in.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it. It doesn’t appear to worry her.”

  “We get wild,” I said, “if we have to stay one night in a hotel without a private bathroom.”

  “I can’t bear it,” Martha said, “I’d walk out.”

  I left Martha to get the tray ready for the coffee and went upstairs to ring Dobbie.

  It rang this time. Dobbie, I got ready to say, Dobbie. It rang and rang the hollow tone you get when it rings in an empty flat. I sat on the bed holding the receiver to my ear listening to the sound, no-one wanting me; Martha downstairs busy with herself and Dr Raus, Tim and Jack content with each other in the sitting-room, a strange person for whom I felt nothing at all in my bath.

  Dobbie had probably gone out in the fog for dinner. He wasn’t one of the handy bachelor cook types who could knock up a steak au poivre in the twinkling of an eye and used his kitchen only for breakfast. I didn’t want to go downstairs again, to be sociable with Martha and Jack. I was tired, would have liked to crawl into bed pulling the covers – I had a sudden image of Ellen Potter’s patchwork quilt – up over my head. My day wasn’t finished though. Tim had indicated he wanted to make love. I wished I was anywhere, Japan, Morocco, a South Sea Island; anywhere where there was colour, not the rose-and-gold of the bedroom silted with fog, I’d thought it was chic when it was done, now everyone had rose and gold and I’d gone over to the elegance of white, but the reds and greens and blues of the tropics beneath a blazing sun. I’d be walking on palm-fringed shores, golden-limbed, wearing, with grace, a sarong. A gardenia would hold back my long hair, warm sands embrace my naked feet…

  “Kettle’s boiling,” Martha called up the stairs. “Shall I use the grey pot?”

  Eight

  We held the front door open while they made their way down the drive. When we shut it a belch of fog came into the house.

  “Filthy night,” Tim said. “I hope it clears by the morning.”

  “Doesn’t look as if it’s going to. It’s absolutely yellow. I wish we lived in the South of France.”

  “You’d be moaning about the mosquitoes if we did. Remember that year in Juan les Pins?”

  “They seem to like me. It’s not my fault.”

  “I didn’t say it was. I was just pointing out that nothing is quite what it seems. There are disadvantages zassociated with everything.”

  “I think I’d prefer mosquitoes to fog.”

  “The trouble with you, Liz, is that you’re never satisfied.”

  I stopped, a full ashtray from Jack’s cigar in my hand.

  “That’s not true!”

  “It is you know. You’re always wishing you were somewhere else doing something different.”

  It was true.

  “Why don’t you just accept things?”

  I picked up a piece of paper from the table. “Do you want this?”

  “It’s Jack’s tip.”

  “Going to do anything about it?”

  “No. Throw it away.”

  Tim followed me into the kitchen with the dirty glasses. “Why don’t you try to be a bit more realistic?”

  “In what way?”

  “Face the facts. Don’t keep thinking that you could have done better.”

  “I don’t really.”

  “I’m perfectly happy.”

  “It’s just different with men. They’re less complicated.”

  “Just as well. I don’t think I could exist if I had your worries.”

  Back in the sitting-room Tim picked up the coffee tray. I took the photograph Jack had taken of Tim and me off the bookcase.

  “Rotten photograph,” Tim said.

  “It’s not bad.”

  “No definition at all. It’s not sharp.”

  “Looks all right to me. I don’t know why you make such a fuss.”

  “The same reason as you make a fuss over curtains and things. I happen to be interested.”

  He put the tray down in the kitchen and put his arms round me.

  “Getting on each other’s nerves a bit aren’t we?”

  “It must be the fog.” It was the day. The strain of going to spend the afternoon with Dobbie and not going. The acquiring of Ellen Potter.

  “You must have had quite a day with the old lady.”

  “Yes.”

  “Come to bed then. I’ll cheer you up.”

  “I must clear away first.”

  Tim released me and sighed knowing I was being perverse. I could quite well have left the rest of the fiddling about until morning.”

  “I haven’t laid the breakfast yet.”

  “Okay. You don’t mind if I go up?�
�

  “No.”

  “How long will you be?” the look in his eyes was familiar.

  I looked away. “Not long.”

  “Have you seen my book?”

  “It’s by the bed.”

  It was very quiet when he’d gone, the day, at midnight, almost over. Almost. I put the cups into the dishwasher, upside down on the top shelf. I have spent the afternoon with my lover, I told myself, upstairs my husband is waiting to make love with me. As far as desire goes I am an empty shell. What do I do? He’d never guess of course, Tim I mean, I could say I was tired, had a headache, toothache, he’d be all sympathy. Suddenly my life seemed to have got into a tangle. I hated my nice kitchen with its willing, chromium-trimmed servants. It was clinical, soulless. Practical it was true. I was not in a practical mood. What mood was I in? Tim was right, he was so often, I was never satisfied. Always the grass somewhere else seemed greener; it was a thing you had to live with learning to tell yourself it wasn’t. It was though, you knew it was. A teaspoon slipped through the little basket into the works of the dishwasher. I had put it in the wrong way round, not paying attention, thinking of someone else. It meant removing the bottom tray to get it out. I’d better do it. In the morning I’d forget and the whole thing was liable to jam.

  I’d just replaced the tray, it was quite heavy, when Tim called, “Liz!”

  “Yes.”

  “What on earth are you doing?”

  “Dropped a teaspoon in the dishwasher. I shan’t be long.”

  Breakfast for another day. When I’d finished it looked pleasing. Robin’s dirty shoes spoiled the kitchen. I’d forgotten to do them. They’d have to wait until the morning when I’d be even less inclined. He was supposed to clean them himself but he managed to get black polish on to the floor, his shirt, hands, then grabbed the banisters on the way up to wash. It was easier to do them for him. At least he knew when they were dirty. Diana never bothered. Just the tray to put away in the special tray space between two of the cupboards. There was a satisfaction in having a place for everything, a cleanness, a completeness even if it was clinical. That was the kitchen done.

  In the sitting-room I straightened things, the coffee table Jack had pulled forward to write his tip on, the chair where Ellen Potter had sat by the window, the cigarette box which looked best at a certain angle. The Limoges ashtray that Mrs Mac had broken in the morning was on the mantelpiece. Surely she hadn’t repaired it, she’d never repaired anything yet, besides I’d told her Tim would do it.

  I picked it up. One half only came into my hand the other like a bombed house stood sheered away. I put it back, carefully arranged, as if it was in one piece.

  I looked at the curtains. Martha always opened hers at night so that when she came down in the morning it was light instead of dark. I didn’t like the idea. Tim came down first anyway and opened them.

  Just the lights. The sitting-room, kitchen, hall, leaving the one on the stairs which you could switch from up or down.

  The carpet on the stairs was beginning to show wear on the edges of the treads. I would have to get it moved before it went any further. Carpet was so frightfully expensive; everything really. A hundred pounds today went nowhere on furniture if you didn’t want to buy absolute rubbish. Of course it was the tax and everyone wanting more wages and as soon as the increases were granted it was time for the next one. So it went on. If it wasn’t strikes it was the threat of wars in various places with the nasty thought that we all might soon be involved and masses of spies everywhere suddenly getting caught and everything in a thoroughly nasty state. Perhaps it had never been any better, I don’t know, only that suddenly there seemed so much to worry about, everything uncertain in the world and at home. Such a strain. You never knew if anything was going to be all right.

  “Liz,” Tim said when I was on the landing.

  “Who did you think it was?”

  “You’re taking an age.”

  “Shh. You’ll wake Mrs Potter.”

  “I’d forgotten about her.”

  I opened the door of Diana’s bedroom. I always looked in on them before I went to bed, a habit which had died hard from their babyhood. She hadn’t opened her window or folded her bed cover. Her school clothes were in a heap on the armchair topped by the white spider of her suspender belt. There were glass animals in a case and a copy of Woman and Beauty on the bed. She’d probably been reading for hours. The bedclothes and eiderdown were slopping on to the floor, the pillow halfway down the bed. I didn’t straighten her up. She was a light sleeper and would only toss herself into a mess again anyway. She liked it, she said, it was comfortable.

  In Robin’s room everything was neat, even the way he lay, the bed tucked in as it had been when he got into it. He slept like a top and nothing I’d do would waken him. There was nothing to do. The window was open, his clothes tidy, clean ones ready for the morning, his comic neatly folded on the table beside the bed.

  I loved them when they slept. A surge of maternal feeling emanated from me into the semi-dark. It was a moment when I felt they were my flesh and blood and that I had shaped them. By day at loggerheads, chiefly with Diana, I wondered where they had been spawned.

  In the spare bedroom Ellen Potter scarcely made a bump in the bed and might for all I knew be dead. The thought frightened me and I crept towards her to listen for breathing. It was very gentle like a child’s. The other end of the see-saw. Robin and Diana slept the sleep of anticipation, Ellen Potter of realisation; if there was disillusionment she hadn’t seemed to notice. I, I suppose, was balanced in the middle. I wondered whether I would come down with a bump.

  “Come on,” Tim said, leaning against the rose-spattered pillows which always made me want to laugh. “This book’s tedious as hell. Did you phone about the cooker?”

  “The cooker?”

  “Wake up. About the chip. You said this morning you would get on to the electricity company.”

  This morning. A hundred light years away.

  “I haven’t had time.”

  “No time! I don’t know what you do with yourself all day.”

  It was just as well.

  “I hope the children are quiet in the morning,” I said. “It would be a pity to wake the old girl.”

  “She’ll be up at six,” Tim said. “Old people always are. When you can sleep you don’t want to.”

  I yawned at myself in the mirror. “I could sleep for a week.”

  “That’s how it is.”

  “It’s unfair.”

  “Life is full of paradoxes.”

  “I wonder which one of us will die first.”

  “Why, suddenly?”

  “Ellen Potter. Old people always make me morbid. They have that ‘on the way out’ look. Robin asked me yesterday if we were both killed in a motor accident where he would find the money.”

  “What did you tell him.”

  “On the mantelpiece. He likes to be prepared. I think it will be me.”

  “Or me. It’s no use worrying.”

  “I’m not worried. I just wondered. It would be nice if you knew. Could look into the future.”

  “You probably wouldn’t like it one bit.”

  “Probably. Throw my nightie.”

  It landed on the floor.

  “Sorry.”

  “I could do with a new roll-on. As soon as you find one you like they stop making it and produce something else.”

  “That’s business. Turn round. You’re prettier than all those girls in Italy.”

  “Too much here and not enough here.”

  “Hurry and come to bed.”

  “Diana’s been at the cleansing cream. She’s incapable of putting the lid back.”

  “Why don’t you leave the girl alone?”

  “I try to. She makes me so mad. Have you noticed she’s blossoming in all directions?”

  “She’ll be keeping me out of the bathroom soon.”

  “It alters one’s status.”

  “How
?”

  “Mother of a teenage daughter. Different to having young children. Matronly.”

  “There’s nothing matronly about you.”

  “Sometimes I feel it. I hear myself talking and sound exactly like my mother.”

  “Stop kicking against it. I’ll be forty next birthday. That’s something.”

  “Couldn’t you stay thirty-nine?”

  “Or twenty-seven, like Martha?”

  “She looks years older than me.”

  “Don’t sound so pleased about it.”

  “Well she does. It’s because she’s so fat. She carries on ad nauseam with this dieting business and never stops eating.”

  “I don’t suppose Jack objects.”

  “I don’t think he gets the chance.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “He never gets close enough.”

  “You girls. Talk about nothing but sex.”

  “Dr Raus is trying to cure her.”

  “I could cure her. I bet Jack goes about it like a bull in a china shop.”

  “What a curious simile!”

  “Apt though. Don’t be long in there.”

  I loved my bathroom, sea green tiles and black fish swimming across the curtains. In our first flat there had been what we called a wash-box with a strip of lino beside the bath barely large enough to stand on. For Ellen Potter not even that.

  The water rushed greenly into the basin for my stockings. I had to keep Diana in nylons now; weekends at any rate. She’d only have them on a few hours and there’d be a wail of Mummy, well it wasn’t my fault… It was futile to say in my day we didn’t wear nylons there weren’t such things anyway and we stayed in black wool for school until eighteen. Sometimes I’d wait outside the school for Diana watching the stockings, usually laddered, and the bouffant hair-dos that looked as if they needed a good brush and feel about a hundred. There had been a revolution. Not a civil nor a bloody one. I had been caught in it. I tried to understand.

  I hung the stockings over the towel taking care they didn’t touch the hot pipes, ran the cold water for my teeth. The children had better teeth than mine which were full of fillings. They liked the toothpaste with the stripe in it, it was a good gimmick. They didn’t mind going to the dentist either, that too had changed. We used to go in fear and trembling. I still did needing one of the pills from the brown bottle and an injection before anything was done. Robin and Diana nipped upstairs with the nurse as if they were going to the cinema and came down talking about the next job on hand. They’d done it since babies, credit I suppose due to the dentist, the new psychology.