Parlour Games

by Mavis Cheek

  ‘Celia?’

  ‘Susie! Oh, I’m so glad you’ve rung.’ This is perhaps just a little too fervent, if perfectly truthful.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Susannah sounds understandably surprised at this dramatic warmth. After all, the two of them spoke on the telephone only a few days ago.

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Celia’s voice resumes normalcy. ‘You are coming tonight? We’ve got your bedroom ready ...’

  Mrs Green sniffs. ‘We’ indeed. Puff, puff.

  ‘Of course we’re coming – but the thing is we don’t need to stay. I’ve been telling Tom for ages that he ought to get a base in London and now he has – he’s joined a Club – so we’ll put up there ... You don’t mind? It’ll save you all the bother what with seeing to the children and everything ... All right?’

  Celia understands perfectly. The last time they came up from Wiltshire and stayed had been something of a revelation to Celia. As if both the audience and the cast, she had seen her own household at its early-morning activity through somebody else’s eyes. And while Tom hadn’t seemed to mind the slopped cornflakes and the decibels and the hysterical searching for Henry’s recorder bag, Susannah, exquisite in her un-motherhood, had looked like an agonised Botticelli Venus among the discord and debris.

  ‘Yes, perfectly,’ says Celia. ‘You can nurse your hangover somewhere nice and peaceful and grown-up –’ She giggles, quite forgetting Mrs Green’s proximity. ‘What a sexy idea to wake up in a London club. Even more grown-up than staying in an hotel. What fun – hangover or not!’

  ‘I don’t get hangovers,’ said Susannah. ‘I’ve given up drink – remember?’

  Celia did remember. Celia remembers very well now. Susannah went to very great lengths to explain the deleterious effects that alcohol had on ageing skin last time they met.

  ‘Of course,’ said Celia. ‘What will-power.’

  ‘How’s the not smoking going?’

  ‘Terrific,’ says Celia brightly. ‘Pas de problème.’

  ‘Good. So – we’ll see you around eight. Have a nice day.’

  ‘Well – I’d better get on.’ Mrs Green stands up and shuffles off on her ninety-denier legs. Celia had seen those same legs whipping in and out of the crowds at the school jumble sale a few weeks ago. Stick-like, sure-footed, if somewhat lumpy; replicas of Nureyev on a good night. She goes back to the kitchen and the veal and the raspberries vaguely wondering why she had bothered to invite Susannah to come tonight. They were worlds – no, planets – apart: worlds, lifetimes, eons and eons ... she begins hulling the fruit. Susie has stayed so sophisticated, so untouched by the trammels of life ...

  Almost at once the telephone rings. Pink-fingered, she picks it up.

  ‘It’s me again. Dear Celia – I forgot to say the most important thing. Happy Birthday, my dear old friend. Blessings upon you and I hope you have a lovely, lovely day because you deserve it. Happy, happy birthday.’

  Celia resumes the raspberries. That is why she invited Susie. Because, however different they were, in the end she was Celia’s oldest friend – seldom seen but enduring always. Like that golden (or was it silver? Celia’s brain is not what it was) thread in Father Brown, she has only to twitch it from time to time – a little kindness out of the blue, a piece of genuine affection down the phone – to reaffirm the bond between them. No Bedford Park friend, not even Hazel, has a link so fine and yet so strong as that.

  Susannah and Celia grew up together in that unremarkable Wimbledon suburb, antithesis of Norman Shaw, called Raynes Park. Raynes Park (like Surbiton, with which it shares a geographic as well as anthrographic similarity) is as far removed from Bedford Park as school dinners are from nouvelle cuisine and neither woman referred to the place at all except in terms of amused disparagement. High spots in Raynes Park society were the opening of a Chinese take-away and the day that the Co-op converted to self-service. In Susie and Celia’s girlhood the local menfolk were clerks and bought the News Chronicle for their journeys to town, and the womenfolk wore clean aprons and made the Sunday roast last through until Tuesday. They played in car-less roads, unseduced from their street games by television, and were brought up on the patriotic mysteries of the Royal House of Windsor and Sunday school. When somebody’s big brother in the road next to Celia’s went to university there were general mutterings about youngsters getting too big for their boots. And when somebody else’s unmarried sister got pregnant she was sent down to a home for the fallen in Godalming. Raynes Park was a place in which to Know Your Place and rejoice in tinned peaches and evaporated milk on Sundays. If it had not been for that brief aberration, the sixties, Celia would probably have embraced these tenets throughout life. Her sister Isabel, though one step removed from it, more or less had – the period came just a little too late for her to really shake it off. But whether the sixties came or not, it was a dead certainty that Susie would never embrace the life-style of her upbringing. Susie was a cuckoo in the nest so far as Raynes Park was concerned. For Susie, unlike her peers, had real ambition.

  When they finished school Celia’s secretarial skills were average. Susannah’s were astonishingly good, she had also taken, and passed, maths ‘O’ level and showed a flair for accountancy. Celia went into a series of dullish offices before finding her niche in the Bond Street Art Gallery which, like so many of its rivals, had begun to employ ordinaries among the Hons (best of all was an ordinary with a northern accent, but Celia’s unpretentious Raynes Park-ese had to do). The secretarial skills remained average to poor, but she was good-natured, intelligent, not bad to look at, and she got on. When she first got the job she was so thrilled with the élan of being in the art world that she had rung up Susie and told her straightaway. All Susie asked was what the salary was. Celia had to confess that it was not very high – you couldn’t expect such a glamorous job to pay well also. Susie worked for a merchant bank – a fairly glamorous job that did. And though Susie said all the right things to Celia after the initial enquiry about money, she most certainly never envied her friend her apparently stylish coup.

  Celia became involved with the Labour Party along with the Hons who found Conservatives and conservatism unfashionable: the difference was that Celia really began to believe in it passionately. The idea of socialism opened doors in her mind and was like a lot of fresh air blowing through, getting rid of the suburban fustiness. Not only did she refuse to eke out a Sunday roast – she quite often did not have one at all, a thing which always shocked her mother if she ever came to visit. She had a thoroughly enjoyable time forging her new lifestyle in the sixties and into the early seventies: shoulder to shoulder in demos (when she was not abroad arranging Art Fairs); seat to seat in the Royal Court enraptured by Brecht; and flesh to flesh in bed afterwards. A Wonderful Life – not at all unique for its time. Then she met Alex and, predictably and acceptably, began to settle down.

  But not Susannah. Oh, no. None of that sort of thing had been for her. She went from job to job climbing all the way. She and Celia shared a flat for a time and Celia used to gasp privately at the effort Susie put into her career. ‘Why do you do it?’ Celia asked her once. ‘Because I want to be rich,’ Susannah had replied with widening eyes, as if nothing could be more obvious. And then, a few weeks short of her twenty-first birthday, Susie had gone to America – just when it looked as if she had fallen in love. In exasperation, because she rather liked the chap, Celia asked her why – just at that very moment – she had decided to up sticks.

  ‘Because I’ve got to escape before I – you know – well – you know ...’

  ‘Know what?’ Celia said, baffled.

  ‘You know – give in to him. Do it ...’

  Incredulous, Celia had nearly expired. ‘You mean you haven’t yet, and you want to, so you’re going away before you do?’

  Susie had nodded.

  ‘But isn’t that the object of the exercise? I mean – boy meets girl – girl meets boy – they fancy each other – and ...’

  ‘Absol
utely not,’ said Susie firmly. ‘Love is a hindrance. And anyway – I might get pregnant.’

  ‘Not if you take the pill.’

  ‘The pill makes you fat.’

  ‘Eating makes you fat, Susie.’

  ‘So does pregnancy. Anyway – I’m not going to risk it.’

  Jokingly, Celia had said, ‘What – you mean not ever?’

  ‘I’ve managed up until now. I don’t see it as a problem.’

  Celia’s knobs of disbelief grew knobblier. ‘You don’t mean that you’ve never – that you’re still ... Oh my word – Susie!’

  Celia’s amazement made Susannah cross.

  ‘What’s so extraordinary about that?’ she asked huffily. ‘It’s only a function. I really don’t see what all the fuss is about sex...’

  ‘Well, I jolly well hope you’ll find out one day,’ said Celia. For the first time she felt superior to her elegant friend. It also happened, though she did not know it then, to be the last time.

  So Susie vanished across the Atlantic in a welter of beautiful new clothes and smart luggage. Celia picked up where her friend had left off and went out with the discarded beau for a while. They had a thundering good time in bed – Susie was right not to get enmeshed there – but he wasn’t really Celia’s type, and she wouldn’t marry him either.

  Susie and she lost touch for a year or so until Celia began making occasional trips to New York and they met again. But by then there was no mistaking their roles. Susie was well on her way. Celia found her coldish and a bit distant and thought, perhaps, that their friendship was dead. Any mention of Raynes Park between them brought instant distaste to Susie’s impeccable face and Celia learned not to say, ‘Remember when ...’ over the fashionable tablecloths of Greenwich Village. But the Father Brown thread surfaced when Celia’s mother, by now her only surviving parent, died suddenly, and Celia, distraught and forgetting constraint, rang her friend for comfort.

  Sister Isabel had just given birth to her first son and was lording it over Celia as usual.

  ‘I simply haven’t the time,’ she said crisply. ‘You’ll have to deal with it. You have no responsibilities, being single ...’

  True as this was, it made no difference to the prospective pain of organising a burial and selling up the paltry family home. Crying down the phone to Susannah, Celia had said as much, and was shaken momentarily from her grief to hear her reply, ‘I’m flying back. I’ll help.’ Which she did.

  Going through a dead parent’s belongings is one of life’s more unpleasant and agonising experiences. The regrets, the memories, the feelings of guilty remorse will break the strongest. Susie saw Celia through all this wonderfully, even to pacing the streets of Raynes Park with her when the sifting became too much – streets she had once said she would never return to (her parents had sensibly removed themselves to a Torquay retirement) – and at the funeral, when it seemed that the whole gathering wished only to coo sympathetically over Isabel and her baby, Susie had put her arm round Celia’s waist (in all that sorrow she remembered thinking that this was the first occasion she could ever remember being physically touched by her friend) and told her to bear up, be strong, Susie was here. So twitch, twitch, twitch, on that strong metallic thread, then as now. When she flew back to New York, brittle again at the airport, it did not matter. The bond had been renewed.

  Of course, Mr Right had eventually come along for Susie, in the shape of an Englishman abroad called Tom. A rich young man, playing with ideas and the money he had made out of the sixties’ property boom. Susie’s letter, announcing her engagement, had ended characteristically by saying, ‘Made it. In a couple of years I shall be coming home to England in triumph – just to show you.’ Curiously enough, it had crossed with Celia’s letter saying that she was getting married to a young business lawyer called Alex. Pipped again, she thought, as she read the transatlantic news.

  The triumph incorporated Tom setting up a business in vintage cars. Not jalopies, of course, but fine old automobiles which his newly acquired plant in Wiltshire renovated and exported to those throughout the world who could afford them. It was three years before they returned to England to set up home in an Elizabethan manor house near Salisbury – where Susie remained as his rural business aide. He also opened a small Mayfair office to deal with the more boring end of things, like welcoming the buyers or their agents as they descended from Texas or Tokyo or Tenerife. By the time they had settled all this, and decided to have an English Blessing on their New York marriage (much publicised, thanks to Susie’s flair for public relations), Celia had been pregnant with Rebecca and Henry had been a delightful, romping near-three-year-old. Fortunately, pregnancy sat well on Celia and at the Blessing she had felt well up to meeting her friend’s husband for the first time. Alex had met Susie once or twice down the years and liked her tremendously – no nonsense about her and attractive too, was how he put it – so the occasion was very pleasant. Tom had beamed down at her from his dark handsome heights and Celia had felt unsuitably sexy when, after much champagne on his part, he had patted her swelling stomach and said how gorgeous it was. Her affection for him was compounded by his swinging Henry shoulder-high and feeding him the dregs of his glass, saying what a fine, fine boy he was. Alex never took to Tom entirely after that, for Henry was sick on the back seat of the Volvo going home, but Celia, in her bovine state, didn’t mind at all.

  ‘We’ll ask Tom to be his godfather,’ she said. ‘If you still insist that he should be christened ... We’ll have Henry and this new one done at the same time.’ And Alex, relieved that Celia had agreed to the ceremony at last, since it was very much the form and his mother had been pushing for it, did not argue.

  It was a year later, at the christening party, that Tom had locked himself and Celia in the new second bathroom and said he would throw away the key (metaphorically speaking since the door had a brass bolt) unless she allowed him to make love to her. He said he coveted her as soon as he saw her and that he had a small flat in Belgravia about which Susie knew nothing – they could do it in that. She still did not know why she felt so flattered at this confidence for she could easily have been the sort of woman to stomp downstairs and declare all to her old schoolfriend. Either he was clever, or carried away – she decided it was the latter and on the crest of that flattery very nearly did give in, there among the toiletries. He was far too handsome, with his perfect Greek profile and fleshy lips, for her not to give it serious consideration. But in the end, rearranging the toothbrushes and fiddling with the flannels, she had made a magnificent resistance and fled. He had rung her the next day – not to apologise but to insist. She had fluttered for the following week before coming to her senses. It was out of the question. She loved Alex and that was that. Besides, she had dark rings around her eyes when she wasn’t wearing make-up (Rebecca was a wakeful child from the word go) and the thought of the morning after a rampant night of love was not a pretty one.

  Since then, on the rare occasions that they met, she always experienced a delicious unease when she saw him. She also took extra special care with how she looked.

  Clearly from this phone call Tom has still not told Susie about the flat in Belgravia – if, indeed, he still has it. Celia’s stomach gives a little contraction as she wonders (looking away from the shuffling Mrs Green) whom he has installed there in her place. If anybody. Anyway, dodging Tom has become quite a harmless and pleasant game over the years and she is quite sure that neither Susie nor Alex have any idea of it. Tom occasionally rolls his eyes and breathes hard in her direction, or holds her hand a little too long, and sometimes – usually after well-oiled dinners – squeezes her thigh under the table. He has never made the slightest difficulty when the children are around and will merely gaze at her fondly from a distance when she is with them. She smiles and hums as she pushes the raspberries through the sieve with great attack. After all, it is a very harmless little game.

  It is not until the raspberries and the veal are dealt with and the re
sults in the cold store primly awaiting presentation that Mrs Green is ready to leave.

  ‘I’ve polished the cutlery,’ she says. ‘Every piece.’

  ‘You needn’t have bothered, Mrs Green,’ says Celia, taking out the extra coins for the extra half-hour. ‘There’ll only be eight of us – not the full canteen. Ha Ha ...’ Her laugh tinkles and falls flat. Mrs Green merely looks dour. Celia feels that more is required of her and goes on with false gaiety. ‘Rebecca said this morning that it couldn’t be a party with only eight of us because there won’t be enough to play games. I told her ...’ She begins leading Mrs Green towards the front door. Another piece of the ritual – she always sees her cleaner out as if she were quitting a social call. ‘... that it was quite enough for the sort of games grown-ups play.’

  Mrs Green adjusts her pink transparent headscarf as if it is Arctic winter and says from the pathway, ‘I’m sure.’

  Something in her tone makes Celia realise she must retract a little. ‘Oh – I don’t mean ...’ she begins ‘... that is – well – not that sort –’ She tries to think of a word which will convey, across their differing worlds and generations, the harmlessness of what she does mean. Blinking once or twice to dispel her inner eye’s shocking snap into action following Mrs Green’s understanding (a picture that would hit the headlines in any of the Sunday tabloids since – before she blinks it away – it shows all her proposed dinner guests in various attitudes of naked debauchery) she continued, ‘By adult games (Christ! that’s even worse) I meant – you know – parlour games – that sort of thing. That’s all – really – just a few parlour games ...’