Reasons to Be Cheerful

by Nina Stibbe

  ‘I don’t think so–I mean, I won’t know anyone,’ I said.

  ‘Bring someone,’ she replied, ‘but please, please, come.’

  Later she checked that I knew not to bring Andy Nicolello because he and JP would lock antlers over something and ruin the atmosphere. So I asked my sister.

  It was late notice but I rang her.

  ‘It’ll be a good bash,’ I said.

  She laughed at my saying ‘a good bash’ but agreed to come.

  The party started out quite promisingly. JP was in a good mood because his son, JP Junior, had shown up unexpectedly and told JP that he and his girlfriend were having a trial separation. This meant he’d moved out and was living in professional quarters at the infirmary.

  My sister and I wandered about the house and garden. It was a strange mix of lovely things that anyone might admire, such as the espaliered quinces along the side of the house and a most attractive vegetable garden, which was like something from Beatrix Potter–including a rustic wheelbarrow and some cloches and even an old sunhat on a spade handle. Inside was less lovely but contained items of interest nonetheless.

  Tammy hadn’t invited many of her own friends but Ann-Sofie from the Lunch Box (and Jazzercise) was there. Ann-Sofie was very much in charge of the conversation and the subject was sandwiches–a favourite.

  ‘Customers come into the shop,’ Ann-Sofie was saying, ‘and they ask themselves, “Do I deserve mayonnaise today?” Not out loud, obviously, but in their heads–because sandwiches are a kind of reward for their hard work.’

  JP listened with his eyes half-closed. He resented Ann-Sofie getting so much attention. He didn’t like her very much anyway, and had once marked her dental card with two stars just for bringing up an article on toothbrushing techniques she’d seen in The Times newspaper. One star meant ‘difficult patient’, two meant ‘nightmare’ and three meant ‘difficult, nightmare and a bad payer’.

  ‘I read this week in my paper that we’re not supposed to brush up and down any more,’ she’d said. ‘Can you comment on that?’

  Now, JP butted into the sandwich conversation to describe his dismay and his disgust at seeing a pre-packaged salmon-and-tomato sandwich on sale in Marks & Spencer.

  ‘A pre-packaged sandwich, in Marks and Spencer!’ he laughed. ‘Thirty-eight pence. Good God, you can buy a whole loaf for that–what is the world coming to?’

  It went against the mood so we ignored him. In fact, my sister turned to Ann-Sofie and asked her to describe her most outlandish sandwich requests. Ann-Sofie obliged with examples: a customer who regularly asked for double ham and double cheese with triple pickle. Someone asking for sandwich spread, which made everyone laugh (but I thought quite reasonable). Someone wanting chicken-and-egg. Another wanting just salt and pepper. Someone wanting egg mayonnaise on granary and roast beef on Rearsby. The list of bizarre and wrong choices went on and on. But Ann-Sofie didn’t mind, it was the customer’s prerogative. The only thing she objected to was people requesting ‘no butter’. What was so wrong with a no-butter request? we wondered. Ann-Sofie explained that butter acts as a barrier between wet filling and bread, and, for a dryer filling, adds moisture and adhesion, and is therefore always necessary. Plus, she had all the bread buttered and ready before she opened the doors at eleven.

  JP clanged a glass to get our attention.

  ‘All right,’ he said, ‘I hope Ann-Sofie won’t mind my interrupting her consumer research, but I’d like to say a few words about the birthday girl if I may.’

  He made a little speech saying that Tammy really deserved this celebration. She’d worked hard at the surgery, coming up with fresh new ideas for the practice, and had had a most spectacular year with the cactuses.

  ‘And, I hope she won’t mind my saying, but I want you all to know, we’re trying for a baby.’

  The assembly made noises of surprise and uncertainty. And then, after a slight delay, called out congratulations.

  Tammy made signs of coyness and JP added, ‘No, look, seriously, folks, I’m just saying it because we all love Tammy so much and I know you’ll want to support her efforts to fulfil her biological potential.’

  Ann-Sofie turned to her neighbour and said Tammy might have left it too late. This wasn’t meant to be heard but JP had ears like a hawk and responded, saying that he had no worries on that score because an old pal of his from med school was one half of the test-tube-baby duo behind Louise Brown, and if push came to shove, he’d call in a favour.

  ‘Oh, God!’ said Ann-Sofie.

  Tammy was fiddling with the buffet crockery and napkins and encouraging guests to help themselves.

  ‘Actually, I’ve just read the biography of the test-tube mother,’ said Jossy Turner. ‘The couple should be early thirties at most.’

  ‘Tammy’s young for her age,’ offered JP, ‘she’s not menopausal, she does Jazzercise twice a week and what have you–it’s highly likely we won’t even have to go the scientific route.’ JP fell silent after that and stared out of the window.

  ‘There are ways of increasing your chance of conception,’ Jossy Turner continued–she loved this subject so much that she reminded me of Melody in her confidence and curiosity.

  ‘I know,’ said JP, ‘I’ve got the nurse on it,’ and he nodded at me. ‘Lizzie doesn’t let her have liver sausage for lunch, or seeds.’

  ‘They mustn’t go to zoos or pet farm animals,’ said Jossy.

  ‘No, actually,’ said Ann-Sofie from the Lunch Box, ‘the best way to help things along is for the woman to climax during intercourse, apparently.’

  ‘Climax?’ said JP.

  ‘Yes!’ I said. ‘I read that too–it’s much more likely if the woman has enjoyed it.’

  ‘Who asked you?’ said JP.

  ‘Ah, but women don’t usually climax during intercourse,’ said Jossy. ‘I read that in The Hite Report.’

  ‘Really?’ said Bill Turner.

  ‘Well, most can’t apparently,’ said Jossy.

  ‘Yes, it was in Woman’s Own too!’ I shouted, but then remembered it hadn’t been in Woman’s Own at all, it had been something Melody had said about anatomy that I wasn’t prepared to share.

  ‘The lateral something or other,’ said Jossy Turner.

  Tammy was now chivvying people at the buffet table.

  ‘Why should it make a scrap of difference whether Tammy enjoys it or not?’ JP wondered aloud–troubled, annoyed.

  ‘I suppose if the woman isn’t all tensed up or furious and resentful,’ I ventured, ‘it might make it easier for the—’

  JP broke in with, ‘Christ almighty, nurse, why would she be all tense and whatever?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’m just saying.’

  There were some sniggers and Bill Turner changed the subject and began describing the garden party he was planning to coincide with the air show. But JP was still gazing across the room.

  ‘Look, I enjoy it, all right!’ hissed Tammy, and she busied herself lighting tiny candles underneath a great tureen of stew.

  ‘I thought we were having a finger buffet,’ said Jossy.

  ‘No, it’s Sicilian casserole,’ said Tammy. ‘We’ve provided Splayds.’

  As well as the possibility of a test-tube baby, JP presented Tammy with a Polaroid picture of a portrait of herself–painted in oils by Jossy Turner. The real thing hadn’t been dry in time to unveil at the party.

  ‘It turns out oil paint takes for ever to dry,’ said Jossy. ‘Literally days!’

  But it would be delivered by the framers to the surgery in a week or so.

  Tammy seemed thrilled and passed the Polaroid around. The picture was blurry but seemed to show her holding a real live fawn in front of a nice sky.

  ‘It’s not a great photo, but I think you’ll like my interpretation of you when you see the actual painting,’ said Jossy. ‘And you’ll be glad to hear JP haggled hard and got it for half what I asked for it.’

  ‘She’ll love it,’ sai
d Bill and JP in unison.

  A week or so later JP was away at a BDA event and Andy had come up to my flat at lunchtime. He laughed at my descriptions of the party, especially The Hite Report and reproduction talk, but was most interested to hear about JP’s collection of antique barometers. I’d been about to send him out to the Lunch Box for sandwiches when he suddenly, alarmingly, suggested we go out for lunch. He’d suggested going out for meals a number of times before and, as usual, I rejected the idea.

  ‘A sandwich is fine,’ or, ‘We could have soup,’ I might say.

  And he’d always say, ‘Or we could go out.’ Meaning, go to a café.

  And I’d say, ‘No.’ Forcefully, and with no ambiguity.

  It occurred to me then, that lunchtime after Tammy’s party, that my continually declining Andy’s offers of going out for a meal might be the thing that was preventing our relationship from flourishing. Could Andy be taking my reluctance to dine out as reluctance–might he equate eating together publicly with commitment? I don’t suppose he thought in those precise Woman’s Own terms, but maybe something along those lines.

  I explored the topic.

  ‘You really like eating out?’ I said, in the style of a question.

  ‘I haven’t done it much, but yeah, it seems a nice thing to do.’

  ‘But it’s so expensive.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose, but you don’t have to be flashy about it.’

  He told me he’d never eaten out as a child, not anywhere, ever, not even on the motorway, nor at school, nor in a hotel, and so it was a huge treat. His first time had been the Mercurial Christmas lunch on his first year there, and it had been so much fun, he’d been almost overwhelmed by feelings of joy and well-being. He rambled on about this rather too long. It was clear that dining out was his idea of bliss, and while it wasn’t exactly my idea of hell, it was far, far from heaven.

  ‘Why?’ he said. ‘Aren’t you keen?’

  ‘We used to go out with my father a lot, as children,’ I explained. ‘It was quite stressful sometimes.’

  We’d often dine at the very top of Fenwick’s of Leicester, as previously mentioned, with its low attic windows, which afforded no views and nothing to pretend to look at, except clouds, while my father read his paper. Once we’d settled, without consultation, the waiters would appear in a great procession, shake out our napkins and set down enormous, hot white plates full of meat slices and baby vegetables, and a lamp-shaped jug of gravy. My sister and I hated meat but didn’t then have the courage to refuse it. We weren’t inclined to chat, at the start anyway–we were shy of our father.

  One time, my brother Jack, when he was still the littlest brother, had a tickly cough and the waiter marched over specially to ask if he would like some lime cordial, which he said was good for throats. And then, on the same mission, turned to the man on the next table and asked–most apologetically–if he’d mind refraining from smoking his pipe during the luncheon period, and presented him with a silver cigarette box in compensation. The man nodded, helped himself to a cigarette from the box and put his pipe into his pocket. The waiter produced a lighter and the man began on the cigarette. I smiled over a little thank-you, and he smiled back and poured himself coffee from an elegant pot.

  After a few tiny bites of my lunch I noticed the man’s jacket smouldering, and turned to alert my father. First, though, I had to swallow down a troublesome piece of beef I’d been chewing round and round for some while. I gulped half of it down, but the other half remained in my mouth–connected by a string of gristle to the piece that had gone–and I began to choke, great silent churning heaves that seemed to turn my throat inside out, and I reached for my brother’s, now empty, glass of lime cordial.

  The man’s jacket was smoking quite thickly and I hadn’t known whose life to save first, the man’s or my own, and in the end had no choice but to turn to my sister for help. She remembers that my face was white, that I had probably already slightly died. She then put her fingers down my throat and removed the beef(s) and, before she could tell me off for not chewing each mouthful properly, I pointed to the burning man at the next table and soon waiters were at the scene with soda syphons and towels. And though it had been, as always, a perfectly nice occasion and no one had died, there was always a sense afterwards of having disappointed my father, of having failed to engage with the man, to matter. I tried to describe this to Andy.

  ‘And that makes you unhappy in cafés?’ he asked.

  ‘Not unhappy exactly, more undeserving,’ I said.

  Andy seemed to understand and said he’d be pleased if I’d try a café with him, to put the past away, etc. and though the whole thing reminded me horribly of Tender is the Night, I agreed to have a go at going out for dinner–that evening.

  Later that afternoon, I’d been catching up on admin, wiping the cactuses down, and plucking my eyebrows, when Gadsby’s the framers delivered Tammy’s portrait wrapped in brown paper. Soon after that Andy returned and asked if he might have a bath before going out for our dinner. I was only too pleased because this meant we could have an attempt at sex before trailing around the town to find somewhere I could face.

  However, soon after that Tammy appeared and was about to ring for a taxi to take the parcel home when my mother also arrived and coaxed her into opening it.

  ‘I’m an art historian,’ said my mother. ‘I must see it.’

  I tried my best to describe the portrait to avoid the opening, thinking there’d be no chance of sex with everyone here looking at paintings, which would lead at least to coffee if not wine. But my mother was adamant. I locked the front door and we went upstairs to the flat where Tammy carefully unwrapped the painting and balanced it on the television table. We gazed at it. It depicted Tammy holding a baby deer, because that’s what Tammy had been doing in the photograph JP had given Jossy to paint from. Tammy explained that the deer–orphaned in the Bambi style–had the run of a bed and breakfast in the Ardèche. The hosts hadn’t given it a name and so Tammy had called it Gleem after a favourite toothpaste she’d had as a child in the USA.

  I could see that everything about Tammy in the portrait would be pleasing to JP. The white blouse with a ruff neck, the tousled hair that had a touch of Marilyn about it (tousled due to not trusting any French hairdressers). But the fact was, she was completely eclipsed by the fawn, whose warm brown eyes, sweeping black eyelashes, dark ear tips, fine bone structure and cute nostrils reduced Tammy to nothing but a beige blob with a bitchy, slightly lobotomized expression.

  My mother sat cross-legged on the sofa. Tammy remained standing. Nothing was said for a while. The painting was awful. Naive but not impressionistic. You could sense how hard the artist had tried to copy the image, but Tammy’s hand supporting the fawn’s body was huge, like a cartoon squid.

  My mother didn’t think much of it either. Not that she said so, but I could tell. She kept saying, ‘Mmmm,’ and leaning further and further back, and tilting her head, as if to get a better look.

  ‘Who did you say painted this?’ she asked.

  ‘Jossy Turner,’ said Tammy. ‘A friend.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said my mother (obviously thinking what I was thinking, ‘Some friend!’). ‘She shouldn’t have included the baby deer.’

  Tammy abruptly admitted to hating it.

  ‘I hate it,’ she said simply, whereupon my mother started trying to be kind about it but only succeeded in being odd and disturbing.

  ‘It reminds me of a classic painting from the eighteenth century–the restfulness of your face, dense-looking, expressionless, dumb and inscrutable and like a ruined child, like Luisa of Naples.’

  I implored my mother, with my eyes, not to say any more because it couldn’t be anything but upsetting to hear such things.

  ‘Do you think so?’ Tammy said. ‘Maybe I’m being a bit harsh.’

  She told us she had actually asked JP for an intimate session with a photographer called Bobby Shotz for her birthday but he’d commissioned Jossy Tu
rner instead, who’d just been on a short painting course and had all the kit and a lot of leftover paints.

  ‘I would have preferred Bobby Shotz,’ she sighed, ‘but JP says photographers are all total perverts.’

  ‘That’s true,’ said my mother.

  Tammy seemed upset.

  ‘Let’s have a glass of wine,’ my mother suggested and she opened a bottle of Mateus Rosé that I’d got for show. Andy was still in the bathroom; he’d taken a James Baldwin novel in with him and was, as usual, taking his time. Thank God.

  Tammy began unburdening herself. The painting seemed to have unleashed some feelings. She wasn’t happy with the fertility programme, she told us. She was fed up with having to lift her legs and cycle in the air after sex, and doing it at the crack of dawn just because that’s when JP got the urge. It had put her right off sex. Now, because of her ovulation calculations, she sometimes had to do it on a Friday, which ruined her hair for the weekend. I’d heard much of this before, of course, only now she sounded serious.

  ‘It’s not like I even want a child,’ she suddenly announced, and seemed to have surprised herself.

  ‘Oh, of course you do,’ said my mother. ‘Do have one.’

  ‘But I don’t want one,’ said Tammy. ‘I don’t like kids, and I like my life the way it is.’

  ‘Look, just go with it, have one, and if you decide after a few weeks that you really can’t stand it, I’ll take it.’ My mother actually said this.

  ‘Mum!’ I said. ‘Don’t say such insane things.’ I was glad Andy was still in the bath while this conversation was going on.

  ‘Could that actually happen?’ asked Tammy. ‘Do people give them away to pals?’

  ‘No, it couldn’t happen,’ I said.

  ‘I’m sure I saw something like that in Titbits,’ she said.

  ‘But why are you continuing with the fertility programme, then?’ I asked. ‘All the fruit juices and pelvic exercises, etc.’

  ‘I’ve been living a lie ever since Junior had that vasectomy and JP got it into his head that he must continue the bloodline. But I hate babies. I’ve never wanted one and I’m the sort to leave it outside the butcher’s or accidentally pick up the wrong one.’