The Life Situation

by Rosemary Friedman

  “Ears all clear,” Marie-Céleste said. “I think plaice fillets and jelly would be fine for today.”

  They looked at her, round-eyed with disappointment.

  “Will you wear your Snow White dress tomorrow?” Daisy asked by way of compromise.

  She looked at Oscar. “I probably shan’t be coming tomorrow. You’re both getting on fine.”

  “A girl in my class went blind after measles,” Daisy said.

  “She’s a liar!” Rosy said. “She had a terrible, terrible headache and they had to make a hole in her head anyway she can see a bit with those pebbly glasses if she holds the book very close.”

  Marie-Céleste said: “You’re both on the mend and you’re not going to go blind or anything horrid like that. You can probably get up for a bit tomorrow if your temperatures stay down.”

  “Daddy doesn’t like lady doctors, do you Daddy?” Rosy said.

  “He says they don’t know anything!”

  “I know enough to treat measles,” Marie-Céleste said. “But if you like I can send Dr Powell tomorrow.”

  They both said “Yuk”, and buried their heads in the bedclothes.

  When Rosy emerged she said: “You’re probably different. Daddy meant the lumpy ones with the lace-up shoes we have at school. We have to line up in our vests and knickers with all the boys and when you get there you have to take your vest off while she puts that cold thing on your chest.”

  “It’s horrible. Then you have to cover up one eye and read letters and walk across the room in a straight line. Michael Woodgate had nits.”

  “They shaved his head.”

  “He looks ever so funny.”

  “Poor Michael Woodgate,” Marie-Céleste said, putting away her stethoscope.

  “When can we go back to school?”

  “I don’t think it will be much before a couple of weeks.”

  “We don’t want to go back to school!”

  “I thought you couldn’t wait.”

  “School’s horrid.”

  “Everybody had to go to school.”

  Rosy sighed and looked at Daisy. They had imagined Snow White to be different, someone special, but she was like all other grown-ups.

  Daisy looked into the pocket mirror she kept by her bed.

  “Will I be scarred for life?”

  “Only a few days. The rash will gradually fade.”

  “Marcia Cook’s got little holes all over her face.”

  “She probably had chickenpox.”

  “She did. She nearly died.”

  “Well, you won’t have any marks at all and should be up and about in a day or two, then your poor father won’t have to run up to you every five minutes.”

  They caught each other’s eyes and sniggered.

  He followed Marie-Céleste downstairs.

  “About tomorrow…?”

  “My flat? The housekeeper leaves at 2.”

  He thought of Dr Adler.

  “I can’t. The children…”

  “I thought your cleaning lady came in the afternoons.”

  “She does.”

  “OK.”

  “No look, it’s not that, it’s not quite so easy, you see…”

  “Yes.”

  “No you don’t. What about just after 4?”

  “Evening surgery.”

  He thought. “I’ll come at 3.”

  “I’m glad.”

  She did not question his indecision.

  He helped her on with her coat, kissing her ears.

  “I don’t know where you live.”

  She gave him a card. “Seventh floor. Ring the entry phone twice…”

  “Marie-Céleste.”

  “Yes.”

  “Nothing. Just Marie-Céleste.”

  She didn’t pat her hair or fidget with her clothes. Just looked at him in a way that knocked him senseless as he opened the door.

  Dr Adler was going to be difficult. If he missed his session he would have to pay. Three until 10 to 4 daily was reserved for him, Oscar John, and he could avail himself of it or not. He had until now, apart from minor lapses, availed himself of it. He went into the kitchen. Having been disturbed in all respects from his writing he saw no point in returning to it until after lunch. That way he would only have to pick up the threads again once. He made the opening moves for the plaice fillets and jelly and thought about Marie-Céleste and tomorrow. He knew that, had she acted like an eighteen-year-old, expecting to be wooed, courted, wined, dined, keeping him guessing the while, he would probably have chickened out. Her directness appealed to him. He had called into the forest ‘qua’ male and she had replied ‘qua’ female. He thought of Karen. Holding a plaice fillet in each hand he put them down on the table, one at each end. Karen and Marie-Céleste. In the middle he set the frying pan – himself. The fillets had nothing to do one with the other. He loved Karen no less, could not live, or was it manage, without her; he did not love Marie-Céleste, merely wanted to possess her. He had other possessions; his car, his typewriter, his books; his ownership of them, touching them, spending time with them, did not affect his relationship with his wife. He would take care that it would be the same with Marie-Céleste. He would never do anything to hurt Karen; never had done and was not going to begin now.

  Putting the fish into the frying pan he wondered whether he had frustrated-housewife syndrome, only in his case the milkman wasn’t much use. A lonely business writing, sitting by himself at home all day, most days anyway, fantasizing like mad and hurling his fantasies down on to the paper as if the devil himself were after him. Sometimes he didn’t talk to a soul all day except Dr Adler, but you couldn’t count that; it was as one-sided as the writing except of course when the oracle decided to speak and that was hardly communication. He felt sorry for them really, housewives, baking their cakes and washing their curtains with only Jimmy Young for company or Terry Wogan with his nauseous fight against flab. Of course now they had Mss Greer, Friedan and Millett on their side, but the cakes would still have to be baked somehow and the curtains weren’t going to wash themselves. Despite his occasional loneliness he thought it eminently sensible of Karen to work. She came home refreshed and stimulated, and they lacked neither cakes nor clean curtains. Sometimes, particularly in winter, he’d feel sorry for her; staggering home tired after a busy day, laden with plastic bags heavy with goods for which she had stretched and reached and waited at checkout counters. Then he’d make her tea, put away the shopping, listen to the stories which gradually came out about events of the day in Devonshire Place. With her second wind she listened to Rosy and Daisy and what they had done at school and why they would need packed lunch tomorrow and twenty-five pence for the Cutty Sark, and she’d start making preparations for dinner while listening to how his writing had gone or not gone as the case was, and the slow change was wrought from career woman to earth mother, her family gathered around in the safety of her kitchen from where she would defend them against all-comers.

  The plaice were now bubbling and smelled good and he began to wish there was one for himself. He ignored the shouts from upstairs of what was said to be hunger but what, he guessed, was really boredom, and began to assemble the trays and spoons and sauces, tomato and tartare, and blackcurrant jam (Rosy!) as he had no intention of being caught out and having to come all the way down again for ‘fancies’. He took the jelly which wasn’t quite set out of the fridge and the cream that was left from the weekend. The cooker was getting in a bit of a mess from the frying pan but Mrs Hubble would cope with that. He wondered if she would wash his red sweater and if it would be dry by the next day. Marie-Céleste always looked so elegant…one piece of plaice had got burned somehow. He turned it over and put it on the plate hoping that one of them mightn’t notice…

  “Daddy, there’s something burning…!”

  “It’s the jelly!”

  Silence. No man was a comedian in his own home. Sometimes the critics called certain passages in his books riotous. He’d always h
ad a keen sense of humour.

  He switched off the gas and, eyeing the load on the table, wondered whether he could make it all in one go. Even if he couldn’t it was good for his spare tyre without which he could well have done this week.

  It took not two journeys, but what seemed like twenty-two. In any case he lost count. Now that the spots were out their energies had quite returned, and when the doorbell rang at 2 o’clock he almost threw his arms round Mrs Hubble’s neck.

  He whistled all the way to Dr Adler’s, perhaps because the sun was shining.

  ‘In the spring a young man’s fancy…’ Hey, hold your horses. ‘In the spring an old man’s fancy lightly turned to thoughts of lust!’

  ‘Old’ of course was relative, and it wasn’t even spring. He pulled in his tummy and tested himself on a woman wheeling a trolley to the shops. He smiled seductively, wondering whether it would make her day.

  Dr Adler lived in the part of Hampstead where there were more analysts to the square inch than anywhere else in the world, although rumour had it that owing to the rising price of houses they were gradually being forced towards Golders Green. His house was halfway up the hill between Finchley Road and the Heath, making Oscar think of the Grand Old Duke of York of his schooldays. Not that there was anything of the Grand Old Duke about Dr Adler. He was totally nondescript, in appearance at any rate. Not much, if anything, over five-foot-five, immemorably dressed in what always seemed to be the same suit and tie or variations thereof so subtle they did not count, softly spoken, making no sound when he moved, his face and voice expressionless. He could have been from the local council, the tax inspector’s office or an insurance salesman. You passed him in the street, pushed by him in the cinema by the gross. If you stared too hard he would, Oscar thought, have disappeared into thin air. His house was as nondescript as himself. Untended roses almost obliterated the path in summer; now the daffodils, which had naturalized themselves for want of attention and which would on no account at the end of the season get neatly tied in knots, were beginning to show their spikes.

  As he approached, Oscar, from habit, began the countdown. Fifty-three, fifty-one, forty-nine, forty-seven… he often wondered whether he was watched everyday treading the same path, and if the watchers speculated as to where he was going. He had no plastic bag so it could not be Heath Street and the launderette; no dog on a lead for walks. Perhaps they imagined him, an actor, taking a constitutional before the evening performance which suddenly reminded him that although he did not want to he would have to talk about Marie-Céleste. He did not want to share her; not even with his éminence grise; wanted to keep her strictly to himself; but analysis was analysis; like football, worse than football, there were rules.

  He looked at his watch. Three minutes late, not late for his session but late for him; that had been Rosy and Daisy and not being able to find the pot of paste for cutting out. This girl with the rimless glasses was already hurrying down the path. For three years they had passed but never spoken. He didn’t know what madness possessed him.

  “Warmed it up for me?” he said to her at the gate.

  She stood motionless; shattered. He had probably put her back two years.

  “You’ll have to tell,” he said.

  Six

  He did not mention the girl with the rimless glasses rejecting the relevance of his behaviour. He was too anxious to talk about Marie-Céleste.

  “I shan’t be coming tomorrow,” he said when he had fidgeted himself into a comfortable position on the couch and taken his customary rapid inventory of as much of the room as he could see to reassure himself all was in order.

  Silence.

  “I am going to Marie-Céleste.”

  He could expect neither blessing, disapproval nor judgement.

  “If I told you I was going to put my head in the lion’s mouth you wouldn’t stop me.”

  Silence. Then: “Why the lion’s mouth?”

  “Idiom. I might just as well have said my hand in the fire.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  Silence. “What about the lion’s mouth?”

  Oscar stared at the ceiling, recalling his father taking him to the circus as a child. Of course they didn’t do those things with animals any more; it was considered cruel the way they trained them and it was quite feeble when he had taken Rosy and Daisy, mostly clowns falling about and trapeze artists and high-wire acts…

  “I suppose I was thinking of the lion’s den, Daniel, you know, the Bible, at school…”

  A liar and a cheat. He wondered if they were all like him and if Dr Adler knew he was not telling the truth.

  “Will I have to pay?” he said. “For Marie-Céleste?”

  “In what way?”

  “I meant you. Because of missing my session.”

  “That isn’t what you said.”

  “It’s what I meant, as you know very well.”

  “It’s what you think you meant. What you actually said is more important.”

  “What did I say?”

  “‘Will I have to pay for Marie-Céleste’.” A repetition. No hint of reproach for pretending to forget.

  “I phrased it badly.” He would not be allowed to get away with that. “I want to go to her and come here.”

  “You always want it both ways.”

  “I wonder if I will get it both ways.” Grotesque sexual images filled his mind. He speculated about Dr Adler’s sex life.

  “Yes?”

  Sometimes he swore his thoughts were communicated by some kind of bugging device to Dr Adler’s chair.

  “I was wondering if you f— like that, with your wife?” He was being a good boy, honest.

  “Like you wondered about your parents.”

  “I assure you they did nothing of the sort.”

  “How can you be so sure? It hasn’t just been invented.”

  “You don’t know my parents. Besides, I think it distasteful of you…”

  “Ah, exactly!”

  They always got you in the end. Round and round and round until you hung yourself with your own Freudian rope.

  By the time they got back to Marie-Céleste again it was the end of the session. It was always the way.

  “I’ll see you the day after tomorrow then,” Dr Adler said, “Thursday.”

  “I’ll let you know.”

  “Good.” His expression did not change. He was putting on the clean headrest for the next patient.

  “Fat lot you care,” Oscar said to himself as he let himself out.

  When he opened his eyes the next morning, slowly so that Karen would not know he was awake, he ran through his private list of presaged disasters. Rosy and Daisy, although as lively as crickets the night before, would have taken a turn for the worse; he could not leave them, not even with Mrs Hubble; Mrs Hubble had one of her ‘attacks’ and was unable to come at all; Mr Hubble, who was a window cleaner, had fallen off his ladder. He himself had tonsillitis, glandular fever, a perforated ulcer, measles. Karen had a temperature, prelude to an unknown virus; he would have to stay at home and nurse her. The previous possibilities an unknown quantity for the moment, he dealt with himself first. He felt his neck for glands, swallowed, pressed his body from ribcage to lower abdomen, sniffed, moved his eye from side to side, took a rough inventory of his limbs. Satisfied, he turned his attentions to Karen. Sleeping, she was curled up in a ball by his side. She seemed to be breathing peacefully, steadily; as far as he could make out in the half light she did not appear flushed. He had no intention of either hurting or deceiving her. What he was planning with Marie-Céleste had no more bearing on his relationship with Karen than it had with Mrs Hubble. Extramarital affairs, he believed, need have no effect on a marriage; the great proviso being that the marriage was based on solid foundations. You could not destroy a skyscraper with a feather. He liked the analogy and thought he must remember to make a note of it. It was true though, put less fancifully of course. There was something between him and Karen that was indestruc
tible. Had there not been he would certainly not be contemplating running round like a randy dog to Marie-Céleste. They had shared so much, been through so much. Apart from the children, whom he loved, and marvelled at times that he had fathered, there was that between him and Karen that ‘no man’ could ‘put asunder’.

  There had, in the early days of their marriage particularly, been storms. To this day his shoulder bore the scar of Karen’s hairbrush; fortunately she had never been a very good shot. On more than one occasion he remembered having lashed out at her with his hands, his tongue having grown tired and ineffective. Gradually the corners had rubbed off. If they quarrelled now it was short and sharp with few repercussions; they rarely resorted to physical violence, a loss, Oscar often thought, not unmitigated. In retrospect they enjoyed the rough and tumble of the old days including the interminable, non-consummated threats to leave each other, and the incomparable moments of reconciliation.

  In place of the more violent forms of communication they had discovered over the years a kind of rapport between themselves which they recognized both as precious and rare. It was not easy to define but had to do with understanding each other’s hopes, fears, weaknesses; with a kind of sixth sense or homing device each had for the other, enabling them to come together, both physically and mentally, at given moments. It was a state of affairs they perceived rarely amongst their friends.

  Beside him she stirred slightly, her inbuilt clock informing her that it was almost what Rosy called ‘up time’. It had been good, Oscar thought, watching her, and immediately repressed his ‘slip of the thought’ in his use of the past tense.

  When she finally opened her eyes she said: “What’s the matter? Have I overslept? What are you looking at?”

  He put his lips to her forehead. “Feel OK?”

  “Perfectly. You?”

  “Oh yes; yes; Didn’t have to get up to the children in the night, did you?”

  “No. What’s wrong with you? Not usually so chatty in the mornings. Can’t get a word out of you.”

  “Been awake for a while, that’s all. Thinking.”

  “About what?”

  “Things.”

  She sat up and rubbed her eyes. “If I didn’t know you better I’d say you were up to something. You’ll be offering to bring me coffee in a minute.”