Parlour Games

by Mavis Cheek

  A silent pause.

  ‘Oops, sorry Cee – I forgot about Alex for a moment.’

  ‘It’s OK. How long will you be away?’

  ‘Weeks. Why not come out and stay for a while? I’ve got Vesta with me. We could be three girls together ...’

  ‘What about quarantine?’

  ‘Who for – you or the cat?’

  ‘Oh, ha ha. I mean for bringing Vesta back in. She’ll be stuck for six months, won’t she?’

  ‘Ways and means, my dear, ways and means. She will come back when I do. She always has done in the past.’

  ‘Susannah!’

  ‘Don’t ask. Just call me Miss Fixit. Talking of which, if you need a bit of a boost, why don’t you let Tom take you out now and again – while I’m away? He’s always been fond of you ...’

  (Celia’s heart jerks in her chest. Surely Susie is not now going to admit to having known all along? Oh please, please no. Celia’s heart ceases jerking and freezes instead.)

  ‘Only platonically, of course, you wouldn’t have any worries there—’

  (And settles down and unfreezes again.)

  ‘He’s forever getting tickets for this and that given to him. Shall I mention it?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘My God,’ says Susie, ‘I’ve never heard you be that positive about anything ... Incidentally – how are you coping with Alex’s little infidelity? Have you done anything about it yet or are you just going to let screwing dogs lie?’

  Despite herself Celia has to laugh.

  ‘The latter,’ she says.

  The Churchman Hotel incident was not something she cared to mention on the telephone. If Susie had not been going to California it might have been different. But you never knew who might be listening in and besides (at the time of this particular conversation Celia had not quite sorted things out in her own mind) it was early days – sometimes she wondered if the whole episode had ever really happened? On the whole, she often thought at this point, on the whole, if this is Vengeance, it is not quite so sweet and healing as she supposed ...

  ‘Well – if it all gets too awful just jump on a plane and come out. I’ll be there waiting.’

  ‘If it all gets too awful I might just do that ...’

  Typical of people without children. How on earth can Celia just jump on a plane whenever things get too much? What is she supposed to do? Stock up the freezer with fish fingers, give them their bus fares to school and just go? It is a heady thought – but of course she rejects it. Mothers simply cannot do that sort of thing.

  But now – just at this moment – Celia wishes she had.

  So – bloody California and bloody, bloody autumn, the fall too ...

  Rebecca returns to Henry and says with an acid sing-song of pleasure that he was wrong, wrong, wrong – their mother is not smiling, their mother is furious. Henry kicks his sister, which is fair enough given the dual irritations of being wrong and not getting Coca-Cola. Rebecca wails. Celia rushes to the window, looks out, and her face quells her sparring offspring. Oh God, she thinks, I can’t stand a whole day of this. Let no one underestimate the sacrifice of house-husbands. Who would seek to give up the world beyond domestic walls for such moments? They are doughty, those men, and strong, and liberated. Such a pity that they tend to wear old cords and socks with their sandals, or they might be the Knights of New.

  She thrust the coffee mugs back on the shelf, an action which soothes her slightly. And bloody Mrs Green can whistle too ... she goes to the telephone. She dials Isabel’s number. Why not? She has to do something. And her sister might be in. Perhaps she, too, is having an ‘occasional day’?

  A little good luck spills out into Celia’s life.

  Isabel is.

  ‘Hallo stranger,’ she says to Celia, with her unerring talent for creating instant guilt.

  Celia ploughs on. ‘Hi,’ she says. ‘How are you?’

  ‘You sound tense, Celia,’ says Isabel. ‘Having trouble peeling the grapes or are the silken cushions uncomfortable?’

  Celia digs her nails into her palm, grips the telephone until the fury passes, and laughs at the witticism. She says, ‘Well, I am a bit fraught. The children are here and ...’

  It is as far as her sister allows her to go.

  ‘Why on earth should that make you tense? Don’t you like your children? Honestly Celia – you are odd ...’

  You don’t know the half of it, Celia thinks, and she lets Isabel ramble on.

  Which she does in much the same high-handed manner. It is only Celia’s desperation that makes her keep the phone in her hand and not dashed beneath her heel. She suffers Isabel’s veiled criticism for spending the whole summer without so much as a telephone call. (‘You got our card from France?’ Celia manages to get in, but this scarcely made a dent in Isabel’s righteous armour.) ‘And what have you and Dave been doing with yourselves this summer?’

  Isabel goes into marked detail. What a jolly family time they have all had: following the Arthur Ransome trail, shinning up low Welsh mountains, camping – the usual finale – on the Isle of Wight.

  ‘Lovely,’ says Celia.

  ‘Yes,’ says Isabel. ‘And now I’m working very hard with my marriage guidance stuff.’

  ‘I didn’t know you did that.’

  ‘You don’t know everything, little sister.’

  This, Celia thinks, is very true.

  ‘Well done you,’ she says. She means it, too. Inadequacy has won. All she has to show for the summer is an emotional pickle.

  ‘I thought it might be nice for the kids to get together sometime,’ she says.

  ‘I thought yours were always organised into infinity ...’

  ‘No,’ says Celia, ‘we are doing nothing.’ And thoughtfully, she does not go on to expand. Isabel does not guess that she is second choice. Sod Hazel.

  Several Isabelesque barbs follow before, in the end, Celia gets what she wants. She and the children are invited down for lunch.

  Sisters certainly have their uses from time to time. If there is no way Celia could ever bring herself to confide in Isabel, at least she can spend some time with her and not stop here brooding. Jo is quite right. England in autumn is a beautiful place. It is also supposed to be a poetically melancholy time of year. And certainly, in this golden light, with the leaves rustling in the wind, the evocative smokiness that permeates the house and the trees sighing for their loss, the last thing she can contemplate suddenly is to spend the day indoors here doing a Big Thrust with Mrs Green while the children scamper about demanding coke and crisps. Come on, she shakes herself, snap out of it, whatever it is. Let’s get going. The children whoop with joy, which is something – they certainly like visiting their cousins. More guilt for Celia. She ought to give them the opportunity more often. In future, she vows, I will do so. In future, she vows, I will be good. Only perhaps not yet, Lord, not yet ...

  Mrs Green is up a step-ladder at Celia’s front-bedroom window as she watches the white Mini-Metro – now glazed with grime and speckled with bird droppings – set off. The car sends a flurry of russet leaves in its wake as Celia roars with unusual speed away from the kerb.

  Despite the vinegary disapproval with which Mrs Green greeted Celia’s sudden change of plan, she makes a contented grunt once the car is out of sight. She can relax. Once these summer curtains are down and the winter ones in place she can stick on the washing machine, have a nice quiet cup of coffee, and a really good rummage around. She has not been able, one way and another, to have a detailed snoop for a long time. Either Celia has been in or they have been on holiday, cleaning unrequired. And Mrs Green desperately needs to find something with the same tantalising allure that Dirty Harry held for her nearly a year ago. Ever since the incident with the cornplasters she has been building up to this. She’ll give her balloons indeed. Mrs Green touches her need for a reckoning as if it were a bruise. It still hurts. She no longer has to revenge herself merely for excessive cutlery and consumer durables, but for so
mething much more profound, for has she not been made a laughing stock on the estate? Once Arthur Green whispered the tale wheezily to the barman in the Happy Wanderer when he was a few pints in it didn’t take long for it to spread to the rest of the regulars. And from there, not unnaturally, given the mentality of the neighbours, there was no stopping it. Her hand shakes with mortification as she unhooks the curtain. She has suffered for that. Oh how she has. The very thought of it makes her wobble up those steps. I’ll give her two sets of curtains all right, she thinks, pulling savagely at the light-weight Laura Ashley and letting one curtain drop.

  Two sets and fully lined indeed. And not knowing her French letters from her elbow! Silly bitch.

  Celia watches her sister prepare the lunch. She wants to cry out as Isabel pounds the rolling pin down on the pastry which Celia made for her. On the cooker a pan of steak and kidney is boiling its heart away, its odour penetrating every corner of the house. Isabel’s boys will not eat onions so there is not even that overriding aroma to combat the pungency. She wonders if there is any smell quite so unappetising as boiling kidney meat. It could easily win over fresh shit, she thinks, wincing again at Isabel’s crash, crash, crash.

  ‘I thought I’d take a bit of trouble since you lot were coming,’ says her sister happily, continuing at the pastry with righteous gusto.

  ‘Lovely,’ says Celia, eyeing the greens lying in their watery grave in the sink. They have yellowish edges. She goes over and starts trimming them.

  ‘Careful you don’t take too much off,’ warns Isabel. ‘Or there won’t be enough to go round.’

  Nearby a bunch of carrots which has certainly seen better days points its ends at her accusingly. You next, she promises silently. If carrots can look baleful, these certainly do.

  ‘We could stir-fry the vegetables,’ she says above the din of bumps and bangs that herald the final departure of any airy lightness out of the pastry. Isabel laughs and redoubles her efforts. There is no hope now. It will be steak and kidney biscuit by the time it is cooked and Isabel will say, Well, Celia, you may be able to do all that fancy stuff – but you can’t make straightforward pastry.

  Isabel laughs. ‘Honestly, Celia. Where do you get your ideas from? Fry the greens indeed. What a weird idea. You go and open the cider, there’s a good thing. I’ll see to all this ...’

  She gives a little shake of her head as if to say that this sister of hers is, indeed, a strange one. Celia notices this. If Isabel thinks that stir-fried vegetables show dangerous lunacy there is certainly no hope for heart-to-heart confidences between them. Celia will just have to keep it all to herself. Small Talk – that’s all she can hope for – and she is very, very disappointed. For what she needs – and desperately – is Big Talk. Very Big Talk indeed.

  She opens the cider and froths it into the two glasses set out by her sister – which have stamped upon them the proud message ‘Milk is Good For You’. In her own way, she decides, Isabel has style. It takes a lot of style to be quite so unstylish. She gives one of the glasses to her sister and says, meaning it, that it is nice to be here, and cheers. Isabel, moulding the transparent skin that was once rich pastry around the dish of meat, and popping it in the oven which is set hopelessly low (‘So that it will cook through,’ she says placidly), looks up at Celia and smiles, somewhat mollified by the genuine statement.

  ‘Now,’ she says, ‘come and sit down and tell me what you have been doing.’

  They sit by the double-glazed french windows that overlook the garden and watch the children playing with Brillo. It is a pleasant scene of childish delight. The cider, unpleasantly sweet as it is, produces a soporific effect on Celia. She is glad, after all, that she came.

  ‘Your card was very odd,’ says Isabel.

  ‘Which card?’

  ‘The one from France.’

  ‘Odd? How odd?’

  Isabel gets up and goes over to the mantelpiece. She picks up a postcard and hands it to Celia, who reads:

  Having a lovely time here in Brittany.

  Whether absolutely foul.

  Love Celia, Alex and the children.

  ‘It was perfectly true,’ she says lazily. ‘The weather was dreadful and we had a wonderful holiday.’

  ‘We had very good weather in the Isle of Wight,’ says Isabel. ‘Of course – we always do ...’

  But Celia is not listening.

  She is remembering that savage beach, the windswept rocks, the little log fire in the rented house.

  ‘Alex slept a lot,’ she says. ‘The children were out playing most of the time: they made a lot of friends.’

  ‘Did they improve their French?’ says Isabel.

  Celia laughs. ‘Good God no. The only families left on that coastline were British. All the rest very sensibly went home. You’ve never seen such weather, Izzie – it was like starring in The Tempest.’

  ‘I thought you were a sun-worshipper? Corsica last year, wasn’t it?’

  Celia shrugs. ‘We change as we get older. I enjoyed myself.’

  This is true. While Alex slept (the combined efforts of the Brandreth case and the redoubtable Miss Lyall left him in much need of rest) Celia was either huddled over the little log fire wearing her thermal Benetton and writing postcards which were sent, and letters which were not, or walking the ferocious beach with the cold waves splashing over her bare toes. Sometimes she would perch on a rock, the wind whipping at her hair and brightening her eyes, and she would look across the bare Atlantic, her face set in reverie, like some heroine in a literary love story. It had been a memorable if mournful holiday. And enjoyable. That was the truth.

  Still with the thought of it in her head she refocuses on her sister who has been saying something.

  ‘... well?’

  ‘Mmm?’ asks Celia, still vaguely smelling the salt from the sea despite the prevalence of cooking kidneys.

  ‘Well, what else have you been doing this summer? Apart from going on holiday?’ She asks this in the tone of one expecting to be told that Celia has spent the whole time supping on lotus flowers. ‘Have you read those books we bought you yet?’

  Celia, suddenly galvanised and struck with a wonderful idea, sits up and says, ‘No – not yet – but I will. It’s just that – well ...’ She pinkens a little: can she get away with it? She is going to try ...

  ‘I have been busy as a matter of fact …’

  ‘Oh – really – doing what?’

  ‘Well –’ Celia steels herself for what is, perhaps, the biggest lie she has ever told. And certainly the most dangerously discoverable. ‘Well – the thing is – I’ve been writing a book.’

  If ever she has yearned to discomfit her sister, she now discovers the way. Isabel sits bolt upright.

  ‘You’ve what!’

  ‘Been writing a book.’

  Biscuit the pastry most certainly will be by the time this conversation is concluded.

  ‘But that’s astonishing! What about?’

  And Celia, startled by the enormity of the invention, yet confident of having a good plot, tells her.

  Everything.

  Changing only the names, as they say, to aid anonymity.

  They get through a quart of cider between them. They watch without apparently noticing as Brillo stops her game for a moment to relieve herself in a great pile of excrement right in the middle of the lawn. They observe but do not register that the four children come indoors, help themselves to crisps and a Tizer bottle and settle in front of the television in the next-door room. Still they sit, side by side at the window, until Celia, coming to the end of her narrative, with the heroine in question leaving the hotel at four in the morning and taking a taxi home, says, ‘So she drives off, having found her Vengeance, and that is that.’

  And Isabel says, ‘Well – I’ve got to hand it to you for inventiveness but you can’t leave your readers with something so unresolved. So up in the air ...’

  ‘Why not?’ says Celia. ‘The heroine is.’

  �
��They wouldn’t believe it. Women just don’t behave like that.’

  ‘I don’t see why,’ says Celia, not without feeling.

  ‘What a cosseted life you lead in your Bedford Park enclave, Celia. Don’t you know anything about women?’

  ‘Of course I do. I am one.’

  ‘Well then – put yourself in her place.’

  This is getting too surreal for words.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Did I tell you I’m doing marriage guidance counselling?’

  ‘You did as, a matter of fact,’ says Celia wearily.

  ‘Well – believe me, Celia – women may think they just want a little affair on the side – but actually – they always end up wanting more. I know. I’ve seen the results.’

  ‘What about the men?’

  ‘Oh – they are much better at infidelity. Most of them can go in and out of adultery without batting an eyelid. Ninety-nine per cent of women think they can and end up doing the reverse. Almost always they end up falling in love. Or at least wanting more than just a one-night stand. I can tell you ...’

  ‘Well – this heroine doesn’t,’ says Celia warmly. And she thinks, Please shut up.

  ‘Then she’s no better than a prostitute and your readers won’t like her at all.’

  ‘That’s a terrible thing to say,’ says Celia, matching her sister and sitting bolt upright. ‘Anyway – she didn’t charge him – so she can’t be.’

  Steady, she says to herself, steady now. For the urge to give her sister incontrovertible proof of this grows strong.

  ‘It may be a terrible thing to say – but it’s true. Take my word for it. If you’re going to make this book convincing, you can’t leave your heroine driving off like that. Nice women – no matter how misguided – just wouldn’t do such a thing. Besides – it’s not reader-friendly. You’ll have to give her at least one more meeting with the fellow. Even if it’s only to say a really drippy goodbye.’

  As always, Isabel speaks as if she is the only person in the world who knows what’s what.

  ‘Rubbish,’ says Celia passionately.

  ‘Hoity-toity,’ says Isabel.