Parlour Games

by Mavis Cheek

  He says, ‘I would so much rather be coming home to you ...’

  It sounds so genuine. Celia has to bite her knuckles very hard to avoid saying what she wants to say which is, ‘You double-dyed shit ... I know you are lying ...’

  Which conversational turn would most certainly give the game away.

  She equivocates. She says, ‘Oh, please don’t bother on my account. I hope your judge comes across.’

  ‘Why are you giving me such a hard time, darling?’ he asks. The darling sounds as if someone had just rubbed his teeth with sandpaper.

  ‘Because you’ve been giving someone else a Hard Time!’ There – it is out – she has blown it. He must pick up on that blatancy.

  ‘But that’s my job ...’

  ‘On the job,’ she corrects.

  The pips go.

  ‘Celia,’ he says wearily. ‘I’ll ring you later from Judge Watson’s.’

  ‘I shall be out,’ she says.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Well, it won’t be at the Women’s Institute!’

  ‘Celia?!’

  But the line has gone dead and the conversation, ending where it started, leaves both of them feeling frayed.

  Women! thinks Alex.

  Men! thinks Celia.

  Needles and Pins

  Needles and Pins

  When two folk marry

  Their trouble begins.

  In Spain they bait the bulls with red-hot pricks to make them run. These are as nothing to the goads experienced by Celia. Alex did not even ask about the children (that he had no time to is not the point): she plonks down the phone. Bald old Judge Watson indeed! She’ll show him. What is sauce for the gander ... oh yes ... sauce for the gander...

  Which sounds very fine said out loud in her hallway but it does not, yet, produce an answer regarding the sauce for the goose.

  Alex begins the drive towards his destination in an even more ruffled state. Bad enough that interfering old Judge Watson should have caused all this difficulty with Celia (rather unfair on OJP but there we are) but Alex has got a secondary reason for his distinctly ruffled state. One which he has not liked to remember, one which he was doing rather well at subjugating. But now – with the drive ahead of him and a bad phone call with Celia behind him – remembrance of it surfaces to add to his rufflement. Very clearly he recalls how Miss Lyall, though understanding itself about the lacklustre level of his last sexual performance with her, issued a smiling parting shot as she sailed away from the hotel in her Golf GTI. To the effect that he was not to worry in the least (smile, smile) if he could not keep up (smile, smile, smile) for she would do all the worrying on his behalf. Ways and Means, she had winked at him, Ways and Means. Which both mocked his masculine capabilities and made his weary flesh ache even further. He will show her next time. He certainly will. Celia has been no help at all in smoothing thoughts such as this away. She might have missed him a little bit, she might have said she missed him a little bit. After all, he missed her.

  But gradually, as the miles unfold and the thought of OJP’s rather good cellar encroaches on his bitterness, he begins to whistle. A good night’s rest will restore him. And then home to his calm and pleasing household, to his nice children, his nice wife and his own, very comfortable and nice other life ... He taps the wheel as he drives along. He cannot help feeling rather pleased with himself – and who can blame him for is he not husband to his wife, father to his children, lover (a little rusty but it will all be oiled up eventually) to his amoureuse, and peaking in his career? Judge Watson does not summon inferiors to his table. Perhaps a quiet night at OJP’s is just what he needs. Yes, yes, it probably is. Maybe this unwelcome intervention is a useful hiatus.

  So does Alex, somewhat mistakenly, conjure up a silver lining for himself. And his whistling increases as the Volvo bowls smoothly along.

  While Alex is tootling through the countryside and whistling Celia storms back into the bedroom. Dirty Harry is lying loosely in amongst her dressing-table toiletries. Disgusting object. She picks it up and thrusts it into her knicker and Tampax drawer with such furious strength that as she flings the drawer shut it hangs out limply at her, the bobbles and knobbles of its condom end-piece (so carefully created by its manufacturers to arouse delight in even the most unoptimistic of clitorises) caught tight in the closure. She sees the offensive article’s twiddly bits flapping at her as a kind of tongue-poked-out and with a roar of shame and disgust she pushes the drawer even harder upon it. Once, twice, thrice, she slams the drawer upon it and Dirty Harry gives in. Punctured, his proud end-bit exhales a little air and hangs limp. With glee she sees her assailant reduced to a nonentity. She opens the drawer for the last time and pushes him away, back into the recesses. The game’s afoot. Celia is on the loose. Nothing will stop her now.

  While the wherewithal for being unfaithful is readily available to those who pursue their careers outside the home, it is less readily available to those who pursue it from within. Those whose spouses remain housewards are, in general, able to rest assured. It is not easy to pluck a lover from the daily domestic round. Desirable milkmen are the stuff of joke merchants. Mostly they are cheery souls whose object is to deliver their goods, comment on the weather and go on their way. If Celia is to find a partner for her Game of Vengeance, it is not among her tradesmen. Not Adrian, not the soft-voiced Mr Ramish and certainly not the burly and blood-spattered butcher of low-cholesterol fame. No – none of these. Celia must search for her playmate elsewhere.

  But whom? And where? Bugger Tom for being so crass and heartless just when she could make use of him. Alex and Dirty Harry, Tom and a Personelle vibrator. Red-hot goads that go prick, prick, prick into her vitals. She savages her nails as she sits at her dressing table. She racks her brains for a man who will do.

  Not the osteopath.

  Not the photographer.

  Not – though she pauses – the dear old judge opposite. She pauses because it would be sweetly poetic to match her judge for Alex’s but – well – although he is a twinkly sort of a person he is old. Celia feels that she deserves something better. Something younger. Something stirs in her nether regions. After all, if one is out for sexual revenge, one may as well enjoy it ... something younger ... now there’s a thought...

  Do not be out of patience with Celia. Do not reject her for the immorality of what she proposes. To say that her solution merely matches baseness for baseness is too righteous. Lob the first stone if you will but first seek out the inviolable purity of your own hearts ... in homeopathy you cure the ailment with a little dose of the same; for a hangover you try the hair of the dog; all vaccines are injections of the same ... so with Celia – a little adultery to ease a greater one. Better this, surely, than that she be left to indulge in masochistic martyrdom so that on her death bed, having been eaten by the worm for forty years, she tries to tell the truth to ears stopped up with the boredom of being still young and hale? No one will be listening in forty years from now so she might just as well get on with it.

  And she does.

  Youth, she decides. I will have a bit of youth. That will double the healing process, for Alex is not young. Pastel Frock is not young. Dash it, she thinks, a young man will more than compensate. You have to hand it to Celia. She is brave. And perhaps a little unhinged. Nonetheless she is adamant. For youth she will go. Her memory calls up a place from her past. A place where the racy young men of her art-gallery days would hie themselves after a hard day over the Hockneys – for drinks, for dalliance, for débutantes. Not a place that she ever frequented, not a place that she can be sure still exists, but she looks it up in the telephone directory anyway – the Side Saddle Bar of the Churchman Hotel in Mayfair, fount of so many lost hymens in those far-off days. Does it still exist? Her index finger shows that the hotel does. She rings the number. Her heart pounds as it is answered by a grand and awful male voice which says, ‘The Churchman Hotel. May I help you?’

  If ever a voice sounded as if the last
thing it wanted to do was to help, this voice is it.

  Celia swallows. And she hears some stranger’s firm tones issue from her mouth.

  ‘Yes,’ says this self-assured stranger. ‘Is the Side Saddle Bar open tonight?’

  ‘Certainly, Madam,’ says grand and awful. ‘It is open every night between ...’

  Celia puts down the phone.

  Her mouth is dry.

  Her palms are sweaty.

  Let not any of you think she is coasting. Like Salome before her, this thing looks easy but it isn’t.

  Now the astonishing thing is that she begins to feel rather excited at the prospect. Adrenaline pumps where once there was merely fear. As Celia begins to address herself to the task in hand – to wit – her preparation for the game ahead, she rallies, and she sees silver linings in everything. Caspar shits, John crashes, Hazel goes to Wales with the children and she, Celia, is left completely and gloriously free to pursue her course. The pieces are moving around upon the board very nicely and so far she has the upper hand. As she tones down her flushed face with a pale foundation she smiles to congratulate herself. And then quickly stops smiling. It reveals far too many little crinkles and lines around her eyes. If she is going for youth she must stay humourless tonight. Dab dab with the gentle artifice of the blusher, and stroke, stroke with the blackening mascara. It is all coming along nicely. Each little addition builds up a face for the world. At the end of the process she glows with seduction. It is the best she can do and it will have to suffice. She sits back, satisfied. She looks as good as she ever will, despite the recent tears – in any case these have only served to give her eyes a softer look, a sort of hue of the dew. If it were not for the little lines she would smile at herself. As it is she merely risks a wink, which is good enough. Surely whoever this youth is he will be unable to resist? Carefully she closes her eyes and gives herself up to some rapturous imaginings. Which are suddenly and dreadfully cut short. There is a blight on what she proposes.

  Celia has forgotten AIDS.

  All made-up, and quite naked, she plonks back down on the dressing-table stool and stares at herself.

  ‘AIDS,’ she says. ‘AIDS,’ she repeats. That’s what Susie was trying to tell her. The thing to be careful about. The passport to modern morality. How can she go looking for Vengeance with that in the dice?

  Well, if our heroine is down, she is not out. With cool pragmatism – born out of fiery determination – she thinks it through. Celia has seen the advertisements. She has also seen a programme about how to deal with it in which a female journalist and a male television presenter enacted the strange mummery of her slipping the condom (‘make it part of the ritual of loving each other’) over his raised fingers while they both chatted amiably to a live audience half their ages and twice their understanding. It had been amusing at the time. Now it is critically relevant. Well, well, thinks Celia, those who mock often stay to pray ...

  Using, broadly, the same liberated logic of the sixties she knows she cannot necessarily expect her Knight on a White Charger in the Side Saddle to provide his Damsel in Distress with such wherewithal. After all he, whoever he is, might just have slipped in for a quick half of lager on his way home. He could hardly be expected to sport condoms on the off-chance that in between the office, the lager and the tube he will be accosted by a rampant floozy from Bedford Park. No, no, just as twenty years ago – if one was to be absolutely sure, and one was not on the Pill – one jolly well took care of such an item oneself ... but where does one purchase such an item at seven-thirty on a Monday night? Especially in this well-bred garden suburb? Rubber goods hereabouts were tap washers and garden hoses – and even if they weren’t, Celia can hardly ring up a neighbour and ask to borrow one.

  As she slips into the black-and-white dress she gives a millisecond’s consideration to Dirty Harry – but then dismisses the idea. Apart from the Thing’s connotations she can just imagine her Shining Knight’s deflationary shock if she pulls that out of her handbag right at the juicy moment. She is aware that puritanical streaks live close beneath the skin of even the most zealously wishful libertine. Too much taking the initiative might render her conquest flaccid with insecurity. After all, the sight of it made her squeak when Alex showed it to her, and she’s known him intimately for years. Anyway – it is her husband’s fantasy, not hers. No – she won’t take that.

  She slips on the red satin shoes that she bought for a local Vicars and Tarts party a couple of years ago (how long ago all that innocent fun seems now) and wonders if there is any point in doing so. Without a condom Nemesis cannot go to the ball – unless she is prepared to commute her requirement to heavy petting. Which, frankly, she is not. She pumps on the expensive vapour of Tom’s scent and, as she does so, the solution comes to her. Of course – how can she have forgotten? She the mother of two? Two children who have brought their night-time’s share of croup and strange rashes and earache throughout the years? Where did she go then for her apothecary’s charms? Where else? To the late-night chemist near the doctor’s surgery. Almost a second home to her once and not even five minutes’ drive away. This time as she checks her reflection she permits herself a smile – and another wink – and she is gratified to see that her reflection winks back at her quite amiably.

  Something else winks back at her too – behind her reflection, on the bed, lies that sibylline book of love letters, face-down and open, just as it has lain since she flung it there so carelessly when she came home. She ignores it, tottering past the bed on her foolish spindle heels, looking straight ahead, determined, determined not to play such silly tricks with herself again. The phrase ’sovereign indifference’ comes to mind and she tries to repel it but it comes on board anyway. What relevance did that have ...? None ... she is almost through the bedroom door when she weakens and flinging herself on to the bed she grabs the paperback, closes her eyes ever so tightly and yanks it open. There are two letters printed upon the page – one from Oliver Cromwell to his Elizabeth, the other from her to him. This is hardly the red meat required for Celia’s night ahead. Still – once embarked on such silliness – she might as well pretend it has some relevance ...

  Oliver writes from the field of battle:

  Truly, if I love thee not too well, I think I err not on the other hand much. Thou art dearer to me than any creature; let that suffice ...

  Elizabeth writes:

  I and our son and daughter wait for thy safe return. Above all save God is this our greatest desire. All else lies buried but your good return ...

  She slaps the book shut, rolls off the bed, shakes out her frock’s massive shoulders and marches, or rather wobbles, her way down the stairs. Out she goes into the beautiful summer’s night.

  ‘Crap,’ she says to the clear azure arc above her. ‘Crap.’

  Which is also the name of another unrefined kind of game.

  She takes the car to the chemist. From there she will drive to the taxi rank and go on to her destination by cab. Since the evening ahead will call for something stronger than orange juice this seems a sensible precaution. She may have abandoned her honest wifedom and her good motherliness but she is still a responsible citizen. This piece of moral wisdom gives her courage as she enters the shop. Which is just as well, for she suddenly quails at the task before her. She has to take a series of very deep breaths (not easy given the racy underwear she has on – how loose women ever got to be called that beats her, what with the underwired brassière and suspenders she has never felt more restricted) before going in.

  In the chemist’s there are many people milling around, making purchases, waiting for prescriptions, and the woman behind the counter, from whom Celia has often purchased Junior Disprin and Actifed, is the only assistant. She finds herself as furtive in her quest as any anxious adolescent. She prowls about, teetering on her heels, building up the courage to state her request. Fortunately she does not look any more weird than the rest of the assembled. There is something Hogarthian about the cus
tomers in an after-hours chemist. Here a woman mumbles to herself, there an old man in plimsolls has a finger in his ear, a youth with a personal stereo stares vacantly ahead, sightlessly nodding time at an array of swimming caps, and a girl with pink hair (Celia touches her own peacock hue fleetingly) chews gum like a tuberculoid cow. Oh no, Celia does not feel out of place at all as she wobbles around, but all the same she is not yet ready to say what she wants. Maybe, she thinks, she can camouflage her real requirement in a selection of goods? She picks up a tub of something from the counter, clutches it to her half-cup underwired bosom, and staggers along towards the till – and it is here that the display of condoms is conspicuously placed. Rows and rows of them – all cheerily suggesting themselves as thoroughly tested, multi-coloured, strong yet sensitive, buy three packs get a fourth one free. It is very similar to buying breakfast cereal, she thinks, and not very titillating at all. The photographs that accompany the range show young men and women looking happily into each other’s eyes – before or after? Celia finds herself wondering this. And whereas the bathing caps show encased heads and the paper panties show flat little abdomens snugly held, the condoms, rather sadly, do not follow suit. While she is thinking this the detached voice of the assistant says, ‘Will that be all?’ and looks at Celia enquiringly.

  Oh God, thinks Celia, it’s now or never.

  She holds out the tub of something and with an extraordinary deftness that surprises even her she finds she has also picked out a little silvery packet from the display. It is marked, she notices, ‘For Sparkling Nights’, which seems fair enough. Then, thinking that they may provoke the same kind of reaction as Dirty Harry – for who knows what the sparkle content is – she also, just as smoothly, picks up a more subdued packet labelled ‘Day Gear’. This done, she feels much better; quite on top again in fact, and with a certain aloof cachet, she prepares to hand her purchases over for wrapping. Prepares to – indeed, the muscles of her arm are already flexing to do so – when she retracts. For suddenly an oddly familiar shuffling noise engages her ears. It is a noise which makes her think, instantly, of her home. It is a very familiar noise. And it grows louder and louder, accompanied by another very familiar noise, the familiar – far too familiar noise – of sniffing. She turns around, still holding the items, and looks downwards, directly into the creased parchment face of Mrs Green. Who says, with shuddering triumph, ‘I haven’t been the same since this morning, Mrs Crossland. The shock of it has gone right to my legs ...’