Practice Makes Perfect

by Rosemary Friedman

  “Do you mean to tell me,” I said, straining my neck to count the number of floors in the flats, “that all these people are going to share our garden?”

  “It’s going to be frightfully large.” She waved an airy hand to the space beyond the flats.

  “And frightfully public. I mean, can you imagine all those people with all their kids!”

  “Penny and Peter will love it.”

  “I am not spending several thousand pounds for the benefit of Penny and Peter. I have worked extremely hard for a great many years and if we are to move I would appreciate a little privacy.”

  “Then you can sit on the patio,” she said triumphantly. “Anyway, darling, don’t pre-judge things. Wait until you see the house. I hope Miss Pollock is still there.”

  “Miss Pollock?”

  “The Show House lady. I told her we’d be coming.”

  I smelled collusion and negotiated the bumps in the road until we arrived at what was clearly labelled “Show House”.

  Miss Pollock was not only still there, she was waiting in the hall, well hall for want of a better name, like some predatory hyena. She greeted Sylvia like a long lost friend, then nearly burst a blood vessel smiling at me with teeth which she was not quite able to replace in her mouth.

  “Well,” she said, in the jolly-hockeysticks manner of the ladies on television telling stories to children. “Where shall we begin?”

  “We’ve begun, haven’t we?” I said and Sylvia gave me a filthy look.

  “Well, of course we have.” This time the smile was just a shade forced. “This is the entrance hall.” She made a sweeping gesture and banged her hand against the wall. I did not ask her what happened if more than three persons found it necessary to congregate in the entrance hall at one time. Presumably one could operate a kind of shuttle service, one on the stairs, one on the doorstep, one in the cupboard or whatever it was the various doors led to. She had her eye on the ball, Miss Pollock. She whipped open the nearest door and said, beaming at Sylvia: “Pram cupboard. A feature rarely found in this type of residence.”

  “Just right for the pram,” Sylvia said.

  “Yes,” I agreed. “Definitely a pram cupboard.”

  I admired the laundry “with sink”, which was all it did have, (and who on earth had heard of a laundry without a sink?) and the gas-fired boiler, over the cost of running which Miss Pollock drew a discreet veil. She caught me glancing at my watch and we made the first ascent up a staircase through the open slats of which Eugénie would fall at the drop of a rattle. Miss Pollock said one could always have them filled in (at extra cost, of course) but most people inquiring after this type of property did not have young children. I asked her what about the pram cupboard, but she was intent upon her particulars at the time and seemed not to hear.

  “Living-room”, it was true, overlooked the gardens at one end but the dustbins of the flats at the other. The interior decorator of the Show House had cunningly attempted to gloss over this little defect with the crafty use of a venetian blind, the drawn slats of which thrust the room into a grey gloom hastily dispelled by Miss Pollock who niftily operated the light-switch to reveal rubber plants, colour telly, glass dining table whose chairs there was scarcely room to pull out without touching the walls, simulated marble floors, orange woolly rugs, black furniture with yellow cushions.

  “Split-level,” Miss Pollock said, indicating proudly that you could break your neck in a moment dashing from dining to sitting area, not to mention barking your shins on the stone steps in reverse.

  “Very nice,” I said trying extraordinarily hard to imagine myself actually occupying the wretched room. I could rarely rely on support from my imagination; this time proved no exception.

  “Kitchen,” Miss Pollock said, leading us into an alcove the size of our present butler’s pantry.

  “You’re not even looking,” Sylvia said accusingly. Miss Pollock strategically stood in the doorway, presumably to make the kitchen appear larger, as Sylvia pointed out the delights of the waste-disposal unit (oblivious to the fact that any other rubbish had to be carted downstairs to the dustbin – which had to be by the front door because there was no back), the broom cupboard, and, miracle of miracles, a socket already in position for the food mixer which as far as I could see would have to stand on the floor or have a flex which trailed across the sink. I resigned myself to being resigned.

  On the next floor, which was really the second floor but Miss Pollock insisted on calling it the first floor because, as she said, the sitting-room was really on the ground floor, despite the fact that it wasn’t on the ground because the ground floor was really the entrance hall and that didn’t count, we found the Master Bedroom with “bathroom and dressing-annexe en suite”. I was relieved to see that not even Miss Pollock was willing to pretend that “dressing-annexe” was anything more than an alcove two by four into which even she felt doubtful that more than one clothes-rail could be fitted. Since there was no other space in the room, the double bed occupying almost the entire area, we glossed over the problem of where we might store the clothes of which Sylvia had a considerable number, not to mention my own humble wardrobe. The bathroom I thought nice. Sylvia said it was revolting and in our own house she would dispense with tiles and have wallpaper, making it a sort of boudoir.

  “How do you mean ‘our own house’?” I said. “Isn’t this it?”

  “No, Sweetie, this is the Show House.”

  “Well, why can’t we have this one? That is,” I added hastily, “if we were foolish enough, I mean if we could afford, to have any.”

  Miss Pollock took over and explained about building projects and developments and having to have a house to “show” prospective buyers and that they would keep it for some time as a prototype in order to sell their developments elsewhere, and I said all right, all right, let’s get on with it, and we climbed the stairs once again.

  Penny’s room would have been absolutely ideal had she not been the abnormal type of child taken to collecting dolls, dolls’ clothes, dolls’ houses, dressing-up gear, stamps, china animals, postcards, back-numbers of all her comics, cast-off jewellery, perfume bottles, white mice, goldfish and teddy-bears with broken heads; Peter, likewise. As for little Eugénie, I discovered, having negotiated the seventy-fifth stair, that she came off best of all. “Nursery suite”, being at the top of the house, was airy, spacious and did indeed have views over London. The only snag was that when she was a little older, if she called out in the night, Sylvia would have to climb forty-five stairs to see what she wanted, down sixty stairs to the kitchen (it was invariably a drink) and up another sixty to give it to her. Having returned to Master Bedroom she would in all probability have to climb a further forty-five of the wretched things to tuck her in, if experience was anything to go by.

  “A real family house,” Miss Pollock was saying. I did not add yes if we were all willing to sit perfectly still and not do anything so vulgar as eat or read or write or strew our possessions or want to sit in our own garden. “Patio” was a laugh. It led off Master Bedroom and there was room for precisely one deckchair if not too large.

  “What about Eugénie?” I said with sudden brilliance. “She can’t spend her life in the pram cupboard.”

  “Communal gardens,” Sylvia said brightly.

  I opened my mouth to warn her about noise and footballs and rough children, not to mention cats and dogs, when the bells of St Saviour’s pealed out the hour and my words were drowned in hideous noise.

  I turned to Miss Pollock for reassurance that St Saviour’s did not mark the passing of “every hour” but she was blithely skipping down to “entrance hall”.

  “Isn’t it lovely?” Sylvia said when we were once more reassembled outside “pram cupboard”. “And after all, it isn’t all that expensive. Not after Fred buys ours.”

  I had my hand on the doorknob when Miss Pollock said:

  “Even the outgoings are not unreasonable.”

  “Outgoing
s?”

  “Well, it isn’t ‘freehold’, Sweetie,” Sylvia said patiently, as if to a child. “I’ll explain in the car.”

  “You’ll explain now.”

  “It’s all written down, Doctor, here, in particulars, and I’m sure you’ll find your neighbours absolutely charming.”

  “You mean all these houses have gone before they’re even built?”

  “Like hot cakes; hot cakes.”

  I was reading with horror the pages she had thrust into my hand. Price, Ground Rent, Rates, Maintenance of Gardens…

  “Why are some numbers more expensive than others?”

  “Further away from the church. Some people don’t care…but of course it’s a matter of personal preference…”

  “These particulars are issued subject to contract and to the property remaining available” the Joint Agents stated categorically.

  “Well, if all of them have gone – that, I’m afraid, is that!”

  “But one of them,” Sylvia said, “is ours.”

  There are some things one cannot fight. One of them is Sylvia when she’s made up her mind. I had always loved her to distraction and would do anything (well almost anything) to make her happy. She was so dead set on her Town House and it seemed to fit so perfectly with Fred’s desire to occupy our own that I gave in, not gracefully, but a sort of forced capitulation. She tried to soften the blow with gossip, obtained from Miss Pollock, about our future neighbours. There was a Lord and Lady somebody, or it might have been a Sir, she wasn’t sure; and a famous actor and his wife, well she wasn’t exactly his wife because his wife refused to divorce him; and a Harley Street doctor of whom I nastily reminded her that Harley Street was an address not a qualification; and a Queen’s Counsellor (who finally turned out to be a Marriage Guidance Counsellor); and a man who owned thousands of Supermarkets (Manager of a local branch I guessed); and she thought some sort of artist only she wasn’t sure if Miss Pollock meant artiste but it was going to be fascinating finding out, and perhaps we could form a sort of Church Row Club, which smacked of lost dogs to me; and Sylvia said the white mice and the goldfish would have to go unless we kept them terribly quiet because there was all sorts of clauses in the lease. I told her that neither white mice nor goldfish were inclined to make a great deal of noise, but she said that wasn’t the point, we didn’t want to start off by being undesirable tenants, and got cross when I agreed and said particularly since we were overlooked by at least five hundred windows in the neighbouring block of flats.

  Having agreed to Sylvia’s folly I suddenly started waking in the night without any prompting from the telephone and thinking how bloody it was going to be having to drive to the surgery instead of just falling down the stairs, and imagining myself just getting home and having to push off out again to do a visit which previously had been just round the corner. Mind you, everybody suddenly seemed to be doing it, moving I mean, but then they weren’t general practitioners and it didn’t really matter a hoot where they moved to.

  The families who were young couples when I first started in practice now had children who were almost grown up and were finding that they had outgrown their homes and were looking for something larger. The older people had married off their young and were desperately searching for flats, bungalows or something smaller. Widows were looking for rooms, widowers for service flats, retired businessmen for stone dwellings in the Haut-de-Cagnes or the Dordogne. I might almost have become infected with their enthusiasm had it not been for the hundred and one inconveniences inherent in the folly Sylvia had selected. I could not imagine what had made her so utterly blind to its defects but could only imagine that with her new status as “author” she wanted to change her image.

  In one of my night awakenings I had a sudden thought; furniture. I nudged Sylvia. “None of it will fit.”

  “What?” She turned over in her sleep.

  “The dining-room table.”

  “Dining-room table!”

  “Yes. It would stick out over the public garden; that is if they were able to get it up the stairs, about which I have my doubts.”

  “What’s the time?”

  “Three o’clock. Somebody has to think of these things.”

  “But not at this ungodly hour. Besides which I’ve already thought.”

  “What?”

  “It won’t fit.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “Sell it.”

  “To Fred?”

  “No. Fred doesn’t want any furniture.”

  “He must have furniture.”

  “Furniture, Fred says, is a drain.”

  “Oh, he does, does he? Well, have you considered in your mad machinations, the price of new furniture?”

  “‘Artery’,” Sylvia said and turned over and went to sleep. I woke her up again.

  “What was that?”

  “‘Artery’. It’s absolutely full of bargains. We can furnish the house for a song.”

  Artery was a monthly magazine put out by one of the drug companies for members of the medical profession. It ran a free classified advertisement service whose columns were as quaint as they were full. Did Sylvia honestly think we were going to furnish our new house with a “complete set of human bones in reasonable condition”, a “Blue Ridge tent” or “thirty-four mixed Dinky and Corgi cars” etc., also “two superior ambulances”? I read out what else they had to offer the following morning while she was having her bath. She could have a “walnut wardrobe and dressing-table with seven drawers and large mirror” and God knows where she was going to put it, an “antique carved oak Florentine sideboard”, ditto, a “beautiful Bavarian porcelain coffee-set decorated with hand-painted pheasants”, “an elegant hardly-worn, dyed musquash stole”, or a “Ship’s surgeon uniform, suit slim and athletic six-foot plus”. What about “X-Ray”, she said unperturbed, “there’s always plenty of stuff in that?” There was. A “large Spanish Guitar-case in reasonable condition”, a “five-berth caravan”; “kilt, Kennedy tartan”; “correspondence course in physiology complete with questions and answers” and an “Itchen, nine-feet three-piece split-cane fly rod. Two tops, silver-plated stoppers”.

  “You could also have,” I said, really getting warmed up, “a ‘workbox from bygone times’, a ‘Fibreglass “Coypu” sailing/outboard dinghy’, I’m sure it would look marvellous in the sitting-room…” It was then that she threw the sponge at me.

  “I suggest,” she said, “that you leave the problem of furnishing to me.”

  “It was you who suggested ‘Artery’ and ‘X-Ray’,” I reminded her, snatching the towel to dry my face.

  She snatched it back. “That was at three o’clock in the morning when I don’t happen to be at my best.”

  Seven

  I did leave the furnishing, but oddly enough to Fred. He proved to be artistic not only in the choice of his personal attire but professed an avid interest in and profound knowledge of the field of decorative interiors. Possessed of no imagination myself, unable to remember even what “dining area” looked like, and an inherent loathing of shops, I found myself taking over more and more of Fred’s work in the practice while he and Sylvia occupied their days in combing the furniture boutiques from which they brought home lurid pictures of items that looked liable to fall to bits at any moment, for my approval. Since I was unable to assess the comfort of a chair from a two-dimensional reproduction (although I was able to take a pretty good guess) and certainly could not remember where it was to be situated in our house which did not as yet exist, they became rather exasperated with me and accused me of non-cooperation. “Look, you get on with your work and leave me to get on with mine,” I said to Fred at one point, forgetting completely that he was supposed to be my partner. It wasn’t the only thing that I forgot. I felt exceedingly unsettled, with everything in a state of flux; Fred, the new house, our new baby, when we had been for so many years without cries in the night and gurgles at five o’clock in the morning, a new secretary, a new clinica
l assistantship and Sylvia’s new profession to which she was devoting more and more of her time.

  It was probably irritation over the general situation that made me slip up in the surgery. I was sorry it had to be Mrs Evans. She came in late one Monday evening when I was particularly busy and had already seen some thirty-odd people, it being Fred’s evening off. Not that it was really his evening off but he had gone to Shepherd’s Bush with Sylvia in answer to an advertisement for some purple grass-paper, “twenty-four rolls, unwanted gift”, which sounded highly unlikely and with which, as I understood it, we were to cover our endless landings, the stair-users to be assisted on their upward haul by a citron banister rope. It sounded like the interior of a brothel to me, but, since purple grass-paper was declared to be immensely practical and the offer at an exceedingly low price, I was prevailed upon to agree. Since the vendors of this superb bargain were only at home between six and seven, and that on a Monday, I was left to do the surgery on my own.

  Mrs Evans was a nice, quiet little woman and she came in accompanied by Lulu and her notes. The history she gave me was one of chronic indigestion accompanied by “acid”, inability to eat certain foods and acute discomfort after meals. I wrote the symptoms down on her record card, my mind on purple grass-paper, and while she went behind the screen to remove her clothes so that I could examine her said: “Let’s see now, you had your gall-bladder removed six years ago, appendix before that, a laparotomy at the Fernside General (Mr Higgins, I believe), partial gastrectomy for gastric ulcer two and a half years ago…you seem to have been doing so nicely since then.” There was silence for a moment while I made some notes, then I went behind the screen. Mrs Evans was lying quietly on the couch beneath the blanket. I rubbed my hands together to warm them a little before I examined her.