The Playroom

by Frances Fyfield

  ‘Oh, this? David bought it for me, actually.’

  ‘Good of him,’ said Monica. ‘I wouldn’t trust mine inside a clothes shop. He’d come out with a duster and anyway he’d never think of it. Your back, he says: you dress it. Not very well as it happens. Fancy having a chap like that. Must be wonderful.’

  ‘Oh, it is nice,’ said Katherine. ‘He also buys food and cleans up a lot.’ She’d been thinking such mean and disloyal thoughts about David, she felt bound to do him justice and praise him out loud. Thinking kind thoughts was often necessary to make her actually feel them. Jenny did a check to see if her carrier bags by the door were still in place.

  ‘Good God. You’re wedded to a paragon. I suppose he feeds the baby too?’

  ‘Well, yes, he likes things like that.’

  She looked awkward when the other two burst into short, comfortable laughter. Monica touched her arm, a gesture of apology. ‘Sorry, Kath, we aren’t laughing at you. He’s only doing what they’re supposed to do, but only ever do once in a while, to say the least. And he’s so big. I like to think of him like that, big, handsome David, in a pinny in the middle of the night with the Johnson’s baby powder. Wonderful.’

  Oh, dear, this was hardly giving David a good image either. There must be a better way to describe him without making him seem such a sissy. A line of magazine script swam across Katherine’s mind and her brow cleared.

  ‘He’s the new man, then. The modern man.’

  ‘In that case,’ said Monica, snapping shut the menu and waving vigorously towards one disinterested waiter who sensed the presence of three women as the beginning of small, weight-conscious orders and no tips, ‘mine is out of the ark.’

  ‘What do you mean, out of the ark? Doesn’t he do the dishes?’

  ‘You mean put them in the machine? No. Sometimes. He pretends not to know how it works.’

  Does he, Katherine wanted to ask, require everything to be polished, throw away toys before they cease to be favourites? Or have an appetite for love-making which required daily relief? She wanted to know, wished Monica would say. Katherine wanted either of them to moan or recite the problems of their daily existence so she could sympathize, add her own and find they were the same. She supposed they were, without being sure. But neither ever wanted to play this game: Monica was never in the mood for secrets. Husband bashing as she called it.

  ‘Now listen, people. We are not foregathered to discuss the better half. May mine remain a mystery, even to me. Come on, Katherine, show us the means to beautify our houses. I can’t wait till after, really I can’t.’

  Katherine’s back against the window was uncomfortably warm. She was shading them from the sunlight while they looked beyond her into the street. She looked into the restaurant, disheartened by the deliberate quelling of intimacy since it would have been so comforting to compare notes, but still exhilarated to be free for an hour or two, with the help of a lie or two, perhaps longer, sitting with her peers, accepted and even popular, the fifth time they’d asked her towards their warmth. The announcement of the strictish lunch timetable was a disappointment because she could have sat here for hours, even alone. She liked to sit. In a moment, rushing by the irrelevancy of food, which Monica ate quickly, Susan diligently and Katherine hardly at all, their corner of the room would become her emporium. Sample bag off the floor, swatches of material displayed; she would please them and it was a joy to please. Mr Isaacs, David’s friend and her employer in his temple of interior design, would not approve of Katherine’s gathering of the remnants of stock for her wealthy but bargain-seeking friends. No windfalls here, darling, he would say if he knew. And besides, what did twenty-four separate metres matter when he ordered by the ton? Swatches from Italy, luxurious covering for otherwise undistinguished windows and ever improving lives. Women, he said, spend more on this even than clothes, I ask you, even more than clothes and that’s saying something. Why not, Katherine had said; what better could they do? They were spending more on Katherine’s area of expertise, her pride and joy. Over the materials dumped on the table she smiled in benediction.

  ‘God, these are gorgeous.’ Monica speaking in tones of reverence. After children, she had become almost aggressively lacking in vanity for her appearance, hopelessly acquisitive for her house, comforted by the fact that Jenny and other contemporaries were even worse, as if all of them had decided simultaneously that household fabrics were more enduring than flesh. ‘How do you choose? You are clever, Katherine: what do you reckon for the bathroom? I can see the place now, welcoming this little lot with open arms.’ So can I, thought Jenny, amused by the sight of Katherine’s flushed face, tinged with embarrassment in the knowledge of pleasing, basking in their approval; oh dear, I hope she doesn’t think we’re using her for what we can get. No, she wouldn’t think that surely, not really true. She folded the material, ready to stuff it into the bag of more mundane shopping acquired en route from the office, her guilt lessened by her share of the lunch bill and another peek at Katherine’s glorious dress, still sitting neatly below the gazelle-like face. Remembered to ask, ‘How’re the kids, Katherine?’ ‘Fine, absolutely fine.’ Asked as an afterthought, answered vaguely, although again, Katherine wanted to elaborate. Only this time, like Monica on the subject of husbands, it seemed disloyal to parade her own concern in front of two mothers who were so successful with their offspring while she knew she was not. Biting back questions, she held her tongue, afraid to show ignorance. Jenny forgot that she and Monica had talked of little else, houses, new food, décor, but always back to the children. Re-embarked now, the mere mention of the word bringing forth a flood of undiscovered news. Permissible if not mandatory themes as soon as all those round the table were similarly blessed or afflicted, depending on the mood, nothing more fascinating, assumed to be more riveting than What does he eat? Katherine had remained silent, nodding understanding, not contributing, picturing the two of her own, the thought of them making her mouth dry and the food taste of nothing but sand.

  Monica’s Italian designs lay on the table, very flat. They had not captivated so entirely after all. Katherine shifted slightly while she sipped coffee with more decorum than the other two, smiled. Georgiana, Antigiano, Monteverni, Romana, she knew them all. Such colours, Alexia, Veneta, names like glamorous women, against white walls and muted carpets, granting a lift and a dignity to a thing, exquisite. The sun streamed on to blue and gold, green and pink, blessed them, while Katherine smiled and smiled, leant forward and picked from the grubby cloth one of her own golden hairs, frowned at it, examined it, twitched it between her fingers, knotted it, twisted it and finally placed it beneath the table while the others talked. Both of them competitive where she was not, one a company administrator, one directing an advertising agency, Katherine vague as to where and how, supposed she ought to have known, but they would still have liked to go home for the afternoon. In that respect, Katherine considered her own plans preferable. She could have postponed going home for a long time.

  So they parted. Bumping between tables. Christ, late again, Monica muttered, squinting at the open air. Taxi? Only a couple of quid, looking for a sharer to accompany her own direction; such profligacy. Other way for me, said Katherine, taking on board the Lovely to see yous with a flush of pink pleasure, standing back while they lurched away the short distance back to their desks.

  Remaining on the pavement, self-consciously shading her examination from passers-by and as a preliminary to taking a taxi herself, Katherine was free to examine the contents of her purse. She walked a few steps, puzzled. There was so much less in there than she remembered: Thank Heavens Monica had paid for the lunch; the thought of such embarrassment made Katherine blush. She couldn’t have borne to look like the sponging friend, even less to have been one, couldn’t have borrowed casually, the way they sometimes did. Having enough was a matter of acute pride. Ah well, the richer the house, the lesser the cashflow, or so she had read, and the lack of coinage was only a reflection; hadn
’t that often been a subject of conversation between them? Let them taxi: she walked, one mile and another mile to the door of the health club. Three o’clock class, duty and pleasure, possibly even more conversation before and after the mid-afternoon, midclasses housewives’ sweat. Must keep your figure, David had said, and paid for the subscription. She checked in the bag again. Towel from home, shampoo siphoned into small container from large economy one, track suit old, worn and clingy, but still a nice colour, pink, and a good foil for her blonde hair.

  She had closed the bag, so automatic was the check, before she realized the track suit was not actually there, stopped again. Gone. These two reminders of rotten, irresponsible memory, at war with her own, clear recollection of placing the kit in the bag and the money in the purse, were horribly disturbing, but the sun shone and she shrugged them away. Borrow left-over stuff at the gym, get going. Call yourself an efficient housewife, standing on the pavement, doing nothing: get going, before anyone notices you looking silly.

  Not enough food in her very slightly swollen stomach to interfere with the purpose, although her comfort was more the changing room than the shining floor of the studio gym. A room full of half-dressed women, thriving in all sizes, groaning, joking and laughing. ‘Spent all day trying to talk myself out of this,’ said one. ‘You never,’ said another. ‘Hallo, Katherine. What a great dress . . .’ Hallo, hallo, her best, beatific smile of great affection for the regulars escaping from other furious disciplines to subdue the irregular body to the torture of exercise, then titivate the hair, straighten the crumpled clothes to wear them better, emerge office-bound or home-bound, newish women. But no intimacies here either. Something I do wrong, Katherine had once wondered, dismissing the thought behind her own pleasure in being part of the camaraderie. Perhaps I’m too thin, too streamlined, too smartly dressed for this lumpy, bumpy crew, and that thought was not displeasing. She had never mastered the art of dressing down; emerged either polished perfect, like the house, or nothing, with no untidy edges either way. And none could doubt the dedication of Katherine Allendale, whom no one ever called Kate. She stood midway through the class, thin and strong as a ballerina, no surplus flesh to quiver even when she ran, which she did with effortless determination until the perspiration gleamed on her long throat and disappeared into the crevice of her small cleavage. Teachers were puzzled and delighted with a pupil like Katherine, at once enthusiastic and so absolutely literal. If you shouted, ‘Jump higher! Go on, pull! Come on, squeeze those buttocks,’ she did as commanded as if her life depended on it. If you said, ‘Reach for the ceiling,’ she really tried to touch, stretching her fingers and extending her slender arms for a quite extraordinary distance, while the others aimed for halfway and never beyond pain. Nicer for never pretending it was easy or saying it was natural. No problems about borrowing Katherine’s towel, brush, comb, etc., she even waters the ferns in the foyer. Can never persuade her to buy a new leotard, though. She fingers them on the stand, likes the touch and look of them, but never ever buys. Hair slicked back into a thick mane, Katherine stretched and pulled, deferring her favourite place in the classroom to another who simply stood there. Let her: it wasn’t important. Everyone liked her.

  Four o’clock. High and low point of a regular enough kind of day. Katherine sat in the café on the corner behind the gym, relaxed for the first time. The afternoon was dying; the sunshine from faraway lunchtime gone to bed behind cloud which sent gobs of rain splodging on the windows. Steam had begun to fog the inside of the glass. She began to drink her tea laced with sugar, savouring it as the most delicious thing to be had in any afternoon. Katherine adored cafés like this, not cafés à la bentwood chairs, espressos, croissants, but caffs with large, cheap cups of tea, tables occupied by one, a slight fug and smells of overused fat, bacon and toast. The caffs of her childhood and adolescence, where no one noticed when she sat alone; being thus almost de rigueur in the wasteland of late afternoon. Neither was it assumed you could afford to eat, the lack of cash a common denominator, comfort almost free and conversation an optional extra. She felt utterly at home, wrapped in the smell of baked beans, writing on a scrap of paper her order of preparation for the evening meal at home. Things so tight on one hand, so luxurious on the other, symptoms she had come slowly to recognize as such odd features of so many of the lives she knew. She had read that in a magazine too. All about how the bigger the house, the less money in it to pay the milkman. Nothing abnormal in hers after all.

  Cheered by that particular thought, Katherine wrote, ‘Avocado mousse; defrost. Halibut? With wild rice?’ The thought of rice being wild made her smile: odder juxtapositions of words often did that to her. ‘Mousse au chocolat’ for pudding. No, not two mousses, or was it mice in plural? she smiled again. Sorbet then, fresh from the freezer. The slight sickness which always followed an hour’s strenuous exercise had by now receded, came back again with unabsorbed lunchtime lettuce. She looked at her list of tasks. Dinner on the go by half past eight, children first. Screams and yells when she dragged Jeanetta away from next door’s Mrs Harrison, who always made it seem as if she was doing them a favour, instead of the more simple arrangement of being paid. Both carried home to be fed with sludge in the big kitchen. Jeremy’s was sludge food, Jeanetta turned hers into sludge before devouring it. Katherine thought wistfully of an egg and bacon sandwich, baked potato with butter, popcorn. Anything sniffing of fat, sugar, starch. Uncurled her long spine from the plastic-covered bench, prepared to leave for home. She wished she looked forward to seeing her children, but she did not.

  From the opposite end of the caff, with a cold radiator at his back, John Mills regarded her sourly and wondered what she was smiling about, probably the laughable vision of himself, or more probably the joke just practised on him. As he turned in his pocket the plastic card which identified him as charity worker for Child Action Volunteers, he could not dismiss the vision of his wasted, humiliating afternoon and imagined everyone knew. Knocking politely on a door, meeting an old lady who was shapeless and malevolent, poking her head out like an angry cockerel.

  ‘What you want?’ Even the arms of her had quivered, the head moving back and forth as if revolving by remote control from a massive neck.

  ‘Oh, I hope you don’t mind, Mrs Harrison . . .’

  ‘I’m not Mrs Harrison, I’m Mrs Jones.’

  ‘Of course you are. Well anyway, Mrs Jones, I hope you don’t mind . . .’ putting on his best lopsided, half-concerned grin, ‘. . . but a friend of yours asked me to call and see if by any chance you need some help with the children . . .’

  ‘Oh yes, which friend was that?’ ‘Friend’ was spat and Mrs Jones’s arms snapped shut across her chest.

  ‘I forget the name, she’s a neighbour of yours.’ He pretended to look in his pockets, at the same time darting glances round her to peer through the basement doorway beyond, looking for clues. The search distracted him: he did not notice at first that she was laughing, the fleshy bulk shuddering with the arms on the chest moving fractionally on a soft bed of bosom. ‘Ooooh, aaaagh . . . she’s really done it this time, have to give her top marks. What a liberty, scraping the bottom of the barrel that is, setting the NSPCC on to me . . .’

  ‘I’m not the NSPCC,’ he started.

  ‘Same bloody thing, I bet, and I don’t give a sod what you are. Encylopaedia salesman one day, social services last month and the RSPCA last week, she sent. That was more like it, at least I’ve got a cat.’

  ‘About the children,’ he started again. ‘Children?’ she shrieked. ‘Children? You silly git. Wanna come in and look? You can take my old man to the knacker’s yard if you want but children? You must be joking.’ She thrust a huge face towards his. ‘I’m seventy-four, you silly fool. And you’ve been had.’

  John Mills squirmed at the memory. He should have been beyond the anguish of this shame, but it still afflicted him as he stared into his watery coffee, feeling quite capable of hitting that slender woman opposite for the mere
fact of her beautiful clothes and her unselfconscious smiling. Katherine rose to go.

  Six o’clock. Monica crashed through the door of her own house, the shopping on either side doubling her own width and making her feel fat. She’d been thinking on the way home how she really ought to go to that gym place Katherine Allendale had mentioned. No, don’t really want to, no time and God alone knows I ought to be fit, climbing stairs, humping this lot about, cleaning, cooking, fighting, gardening even. Whatever the money there never seemed anyone else to do the work. Buys the groceries, does he, David Allendale? What a joke. Must tell Colin that; also about David buying dresses. The same David Allendale who was about to supervise the construction of a conservatory for Monica’s own house, something akin to one she had spied elsewhere, but nothing to approximate to Katherine’s kitchen. Not only was Katherine thin with a gorgeous house, but the man indoors did most of the shopping while she remained untroubled and generous. Monica manoeuvred round the door, only slightly angered by such transient thoughts, conscious as soon as she entered of who was in and who was not. Husband a few miles off, discussing plans with David Allendale, plenty of discussing the way he liked. At least she knew where he was, which was something of a luxury. Guess who would, after all the discussions, clean up the sawdust, brick dust and any other kind of dust while the children rolled. Shit. ‘Mummy, Mummy, Mummeee . . .’ shrieks from the corner of the stairs facing the front door, howls of joy and argument from above. The first of two boys launched himself towards her from the landing, head first, like a human sledge across the carpeted treads, braking with his hands, slithering down at horrible speed in a series of bumps. A new turn, this, designed to bring heart to mouth. She did not pause for breath, expelled her opening shout even as her bags hit the floor.