by David Miller
He fell silent and ran a finger around the inside of his collar. He didn’t understand. He wasn’t even sure the woman had been listening. He didn’t know what else to do now; he was still holding the vase. The sweet odor of the roses filled his nostrils and inexplicably caused a pang of regret. The entire time he’d been waiting, the woman had apparently been lost in thought. It was as if all the while he’d been standing there, talking, shifting his weight, holding his flowers, she had been someplace else, somewhere far from Badenweiler. But now she came back to herself, and her face assumed another expression. She raised her eyes, looked at him, and then shook her head. She seemed to be struggling to understand what on earth this young man could be doing there in the room holding a vase with three yellow roses. Flowers? She hadn’t ordered flowers.
The moment passed. She went over to her handbag and scooped up some coins. She drew out a number of banknotes as well. The young man touched his lips with his tongue; another large tip was forthcoming, but for what? What did she want him to do? He’d never before waited on such guests. He cleared his throat once more.
No breakfast, the woman said. Not yet, at any rate. Breakfast wasn’t the important thing this morning. She required something else. She needed him to go out and bring back a mortician. Did he understand her? Herr Chekhov was dead, you see. Comprenezvous? Young man? Anton Chekhov was dead. Now listen carefully to me, she said. She wanted him to go downstairs and ask someone at the front desk where he could go to find the most respected mortician in the city. Someone reliable, who took great pains in his work and whose manner was appropriately reserved. A mortician, in short, worthy of a great artist. Here, she said, and pressed the money on him. Tell them downstairs that I have specifically requested you to perform this duty for me. Are you listening? Do you understand what I’m saying to you?
The young man grappled to take in what she was saying. He chose not to look again in the direction of the other room. He had sensed that something was not right. He became aware of his heart beating rapidly under his jacket, and he felt perspiration break out on his forehead. He didn’t know where he should turn his eyes. He wanted to put the vase down.
Please do this for me, the woman said. I’ll remember you with gratitude. Tell them downstairs that I insist. Say that. But don’t call any unnecessary attention to yourself or to the situation. Just say that this is necessary, that I request it – and that’s all. Do you hear me? Nod if you understand. Above all, don’t raise an alarm. Everything else, all the rest, the commotion – that’ll come soon enough. The worst is over. Do we understand each other?
The young man’s face had grown pale. He stood rigid, clasping the vase. He managed to nod his head.
After securing permission to leave the hotel he was to proceed quietly and resolutely, though without any unbecoming haste, to the mortician’s. He was to behave exactly as if he were engaged on a very important errand, nothing more. He was engaged on an important errand, she said. And if it would help keep his movements purposeful he should imagine himself as someone moving down the busy sidewalk carrying in his arms a porcelain vase of roses that he had to deliver to an important man. (She spoke quietly, almost confidentially, as if to a relative or a friend.) He could even tell himself that the man he was going to see was expecting him, was perhaps impatient for him to arrive with his flowers. Nevertheless, the young man was not to become excited and run, or otherwise break his stride. Remember the vase he was carrying! He was to walk briskly, comporting himself at all times in as dignified a manner as possible. He should keep walking until he came to the mortician’s house and stood before the door. He would then raise the brass knocker and let it fall, once, twice, three times. In a minute the mortician himself would answer.
This mortician would be in his forties, no doubt, or maybe early fifties – bald, solidly built, wearing steel-frame spectacles set very low on his nose. He would be modest, unassuming, a man who would ask only the most direct and necessary questions. An apron. Probably he would be wearing an apron. He might even be wiping his hands on a dark towel while he listened to what was being said. There’d be a faint whiff of formaldehyde on his clothes. But it was all right, and the young man shouldn’t worry. He was nearly a grown-up now and shouldn’t be frightened or repelled by any of this. The mortician would hear him out. He was a man of restraint and bearing, this mortician, someone who could help allay people’s fears in this situation, not increase them. Long ago he’d acquainted himself with death in all its various guises and forms; death held no surprises for him any longer, no hidden secrets. It was this man whose services were required this morning.
The mortician takes the vase of roses. Only once while the young man is speaking does the mortician betray the least flicker of interest, or indicate that he’s heard anything out of the ordinary. But the one time the young man mentions the name of the deceased, the mortician’s eyebrows rise just a little. Chekhov, you say? Just a minute, and I’ll be with you.
Do you understand what I’m saying, Olga said to the young man. Leave the glasses. Don’t worry about them. Forget about crystal wineglasses and such. Leave the room as it is. Everything is ready now. We’re ready. Will you go?
But at that moment the young man was thinking of the cork still resting near the toe of his shoe. To retrieve it he would have to bend over, still gripping the vase. He would do this. He leaned over. Without looking down, he reached out and closed it into his hand.
THE DYING ROOM
Georgina Hammick
Georgina Hammick (b.1939) was born in Hampshire, educated in Kenya and England and later attended the Academie Julian in Paris as well as the Salisbury School of Art. She is the author of People for Lunch, Spoilt and Green Man Running.
I think I left my wireless in the drawing room, his mother said. Could you get it? I’d be grateful.
His mother and he were in the kitchen. He took a big breath. He said, You can’t use that word any more, I’m sorry, we’ve decided.
What word are you talking about? his mother said. She took a tray of cheese tartlets from the oven and put them on the table. His mother is a cook. She cooks for her family when they’re at home and she cooks professionally: for other women’s freezers and other women’s lunch and dinner parties. She also supplies, on a regular basis, her local delicatessen with pâtés and terrines and tarts and quiches. Blast, these look a bit burnt to me, his mother said. Do they look burnt to you? What word can’t I use?
“Drawing room”, he said. It’s an anachronism, it’s irrelevant. It’s snobbish. It has associations with mindless West End theatre. It’s embarrassing.
His mother said nothing for a minute. She looked thoughtful; she looked thoughtfully at her feet. Then she said, Who are “we”? “We” who have decided?
My sisters and I, he told her. Your children. All of them.
I see, his mother said. First I’ve heard of this, I have to say.
The point is, he said, our friends, the ones we bring here, find it offensive – or a joke. And so do we. It is offensive, and ridiculous, to continue to use a word that means nothing to ninety-nine per cent of the population, that ninety-nine per cent of the population does not use.
Hang on a minute, his mother said, I just want to get this straight. You’re at university, and most of the people you bring here, from whatever background, are students too. Are you saying that this doesn’t make you an elite of some kind? Are you telling me that the words you use in your essays are the words ninety-nine per cent of the population uses? Don’t look at me like that, his mother said. If you want to know, I don’t feel that strongly about “drawing room”; it’s what your father called it, it’s the habit of a lifetime, but you can break habits. I have wondered about it. The room in question is rather small for a drawing room. What word would you like me to use instead? “Lounge”?
There were other words, he told his mother.
Are there? his mother said. What’s wrong with “lounge”? I bet “lounge” is what ni
nety-nine per cent of the population uses. But if you don’t like it, if its airport and hotel connotations bother you, how about “front room”? Will that do?
The room his mother calls the “drawing room” is at the back of the house and looks on to the back garden. It looks on to a square of lawn with three apple trees on it, two mixed borders either side and, beyond the lawn and divided from it by a box hedge, the vegetable garden: peasticks and bean poles and a rusty fruit cage and a potting shed. A cottage garden, his mother has always described it as.
I can’t call it the “morning room”, his mother murmured, more to herself than to him, because we tend to use it mostly in the evenings. I can’t call it the “music room” because none of us plays an instrument, and because all those gramophones – those CD and tape-deck affairs – are in your bedrooms. To call it the “smoking room”, though when you’re at home accurate, would be tantamount to encouraging a health-wrecking practice I deplore.
His mother was mocking him. She was, as usual, refusing to address the issue, a serious and important one. She was declining to engage with the argument. He said so.
Address the issue? Engage with the argument? His mother turned the phrases over and weighed them in invisible scales. Engage with the argument. Is that an expression ninety-nine per cent of the pop …? Well, no matter. Where was I? I know, in the “parlour”. I like “parlour”, I rather go for “parlour”. It’s an old word. It conjures up monks in monasteries having a chinwag, it conjures up people in ruffs having a tête-à-tête. Then there’s the ice-cream side of it, of course – oh, and massage, and nail buffing and leg waxing … Which reminds me …
Oh for God’s sake, he said.
I like “parlour”, his mother said. I think I like “parlour” best. But on the other hand – parlare, parlatorium – a bit too elitist, don’t you think? On the whole?
Look, he said, there are other names for rooms, ordinary ones, not jokey or archaic or patronising, that you haven’t mentioned yet, that you seem to be deliberately avoiding.
If you mean “sitting room”, his mother said, I did think of it, it did occur to me, and then I thought, No, too safe, a compromise choice, with a whiff of amontillado about it.
It’s less offensive than “drawing room”. And it’s more exact – people do tend to sit in rooms.
Probably it is for you, his mother said. You and your siblings and friends are great sitters. Great loungers and withdrawers too, I might say. But I don’t have that much time for sitting. In the room that for the moment shall be nameless I tend to stand.
His mother was standing as she said this. She was standing by the stove, lifting the lid from the saucepan, giving the soup a stir. He was sitting on a chair at the table, lounging perhaps. He sat up. He stood up.
You haven’t got an ashtray, his mother said, here, use this. By the way, his mother said, did I ever tell you about the misprint your father found in the local paper once? In an estate agent’s advertisement? “Five bed, two bath, kitchen, dining room, shitting room”? Or perhaps it wasn’t a misprint, who can say? This soup doesn’t taste of anything much, his mother said, come and try it. Come and tell me what you think it needs.
He took the spoon from his mother’s hand and tasted her soup. It’s okay, he said, it’s fine, could do with more salt. The name you’re avoiding, he said, the name we use, as you must have noticed, that we want you to use, is “living room”. A room for living in. The room where people live. Graham Greene wrote a play about it. No, he said (for he could see his mother was about to interrupt him), there are no jokes to be made. I defy you to be satirical about this one. “Living room” is accurate. And it’s classless, it embraces all. The pathetic thing is (and he banged his fist on the table) it’d be impossible to have this argument anywhere else but here! It’d be meaningless anywhere but in Little England. Christ, what a shower!
Nineteen fifty-three, was it? his mother said, or nineteen fifty-four? The year I saw The Living Room. Dorothy Tutin was made a star overnight – don’t think that sort of thing happens any more, does it? I’d seen her in Much Ado at the Phoenix, but … Look, it’s accuracy I want to quiz you about, his mother said. Pass me that colander, would you. No not that one, the red one. Think for a moment – where are we having this conversation? If we can be said to live anywhere, it’s the kitchen – except for your grandfather, poor man, who lives in the lavatory. No, we live in the kitchen and we make occasional forays – withdraw, if you like – into –
You’re so clever, he said, you think everything can be reduced to a clever, silly, word game.
No, his mother said, no I don’t, I just want to understand your motives, which I suspect are suspect.
Our motives, our motive, is clear, he said. There’s nothing eccentric about it. We’re egalitarians and we want to live in an egalitarian world. Drawing rooms – withdrawing rooms, as no doubt you’d prefer – have no place in that world. They have nothing to do with the real world as it is now. They have to do with privilege and power. They have to do with tribalism in the worst sense.
His mother took a bunch of parsley from a jam jar on the windowsill. Do come and see what these sparrows are up to! she said. Damn, you’re too late, she said. She put the parsley on a chopping board. Then she took five soup bowls off the dresser and put them in the bottom oven. She straightened up.
He said, Look, doesn’t it embarrass you when you say “drawing room” to Mrs Todd, for example? Doesn’t it make you feel uncomfortable? Doesn’t it? It does us, I can tell you.
His mother looked astonished. She said, You astonish me. Why ever should it? It doesn’t embarrass her. I’ll tell you how it works. I say to her, Oh Mrs Todd, the children were down at the weekend, and you know what that means, so I think the drawing room could do with some special attention … or she’ll say to me, Thought I might do the lounge through today, Mrs Symonds – kids home Sunday, were they? Point is, we have our own language, a language we feel comfortable in, and we stick to it. Both of us. Not just me. Don’t think it’s just me. But we understand each other. We do. And – though you may not believe this – we’re fond of each other. We’ve got a lot in common. We’re both working women, we’re both widows. We’ve been seeing each other twice a week now for what? – fifteen years. I know a lot about her life, I know all about our Malcolm and our Cheryl and our Diane and our Diane’s baby Gary – who’s teething at the moment incidentally – and she knows even more about my life. I remember her birthday, and she – unlike some I could mention – always remembers mine. I went to see her when she was in hospital, and she came to see me when I was. She came on the bus the day after my op, and then later in the week she got Malcolm to drive her over after work. Malcolm’s pick-up is very unreliable, you know. He spends all his Sundays working on it, but even so it invariably fails its MOT. If it isn’t the gear box it’s the brakes, and if it isn’t the brakes it’s the exhaust … I’m very much afraid Malcolm was sold a pup.
If you’re such good friends, he said, if you know everything there is to know about Mrs Todd’s life, how come you don’t call her by her first name? How come she doesn’t call you by your first name?
Ah, you can’t catch me there, his mother said. The answer is because she doesn’t want it. I asked her once. She’d been here about a year, and I said, Mrs Todd, don’t you think we’ve known each other long enough to call each other by our Christian names? Mine’s Elizabeth, as I expect you know. And she said, Think I’d rather leave things the way they are, if it’s all the same to you, Mrs Symonds. So we did. I did feel crushed at the time, I did feel a bit snubbed, but I don’t think she meant to snub me. I really don’t think she did.
About “living room”, he said.
Oh that, his mother said. If that’s what you’re set on, I’ll give it a try. But if you want to bring Mrs Todd into line, I fear you’ve got problems – she’s a “lounge” person, definitely. “Definitely” is another of her words. She says “definitely” very often when I’
d say “yes”. Do you find your microwave has made life easier, Mrs Todd? I’ll ask her, and she’ll say, Oh definitely, definitely. It definitely do, definitely. Mrs Todd is a very definite person. If you think you can get her to turn her lounge into a living room, well, good luck.
I never said I wanted her to alter anything, he said. You’re putting words into my mouth. I never said that. Of course she can keep her lounge. We want you to get rid of your drawing room, which is quite different. He hesitated. He said, We won’t bring our friends here unless you do.
Can I have that in writing? his mother said. Joke, she said, when she saw his frown. Could you pass me that baking tray please. Actually, Kit, I don’t like your tone. Dictatorship and blackmail seem to be the names of your game. Why? Couldn’t you wait for evolution to do the job? You won’t have to wait long. “Nurseries” – in houses large enough to have a nursery – are mostly “playrooms” now. “Studies” have turned themselves into “telly rooms”. “Drawing rooms” are dying even as we speak. By the time my generation is under the sod, the only “drawing rooms” left will be in palaces and stately homes. Truly, you won’t have to wait long.