The Playroom

by Frances Fyfield

  ‘Hungry, Mummy.’

  ‘No you aren’t. You can’t be hungry.’

  ‘I am, I am.’

  David’s romantic mood, fading in front of her eyes, the sound of the intercom ominously still. Jeanetta pretending to cry, damn, damn, damn. She was fiddling with the cupboard door, where had she put those biscuits, not here, not there, something had magicked them away, she said, still looking, aware from the lighter steps that he had come back into the room, materializing from the nether regions like a genie.

  ‘I want a word with you, young lady.’

  Jeanetta stopped crying. Any attention was better than none and Mummy was not really trying. Katherine got up from her knees and went over to her daughter.

  ‘She’s only whining, darling, take no notice. She’s overtired.’

  ‘Tired? Why tired? She’s plenty of energy for taking things which aren’t hers. That’s Jeremy’s teddy she’s got there. And a few other things not hers upstairs as well. And look at the state of her. She’s got something stuck in her hair.’

  ‘David, please. She’s only four. How should she know? Jeremy must have given her the teddy and Mrs Harrison gives her things. She doesn’t just take them . . .’

  ‘What’s this eh?’ He seemed to have leapt to Jeanetta’s side, playfully. Picked up a hank of her straggly, thick hair, held it aloft. She looked at him hopefully, sensing a lightening in the tone, ready for a game.

  ‘Don’t shout, David.’

  ‘I’m not shouting. I simply raised my voice.’

  True. He never shouted, just as she never argued. She knew very well how bits and pieces of other children’s toys came into the house, pushed down the side of Jeremy’s chair, secreted by Jeanetta and, amusingly, recovered later. Katherine thought it was really a bit of a joke, nobody minded really. She wouldn’t have minded either, like all these things they had, wonderful, but giving away the surplus didn’t matter. You’re welcome to old toys, she would have said, but he was still holding on to Jeanetta’s hair, and she wished he wouldn’t.

  ‘Chewing gum,’ he said finally in tones of enormous disgust. The child did not flinch. She beamed instead. David’s movements had become swifter, horribly efficient. He pulled her gently and she followed willingly towards the kitchen sink where lay the kitchen scissors, still sticky from cutting the slivers of cooked bacon he had added to the salad. Jeanetta still smiled when the blades of the scissors cut cleanly and noisily through her hair, shearing off a whole pony-tail of sticky curls. Only when the tangled mass hit the floor and she raised one uncertain hand to her head to feel the shorn reminder, did the smile waver. Katherine felt the sound of the scissors champing as if they had been applied directly to her own skull. Jeanetta’s only pretension to beauty, her crowning glory, lay on the kitchen floor, and still she smiled. In some instinct, Katherine smiled too, grinned desperate encouragement at her daughter while protectively, her hand flew to her own head.

  ‘Me tomorrow,’ she said, suddenly inspired to say the right thing. ‘Oh, it does look nice. Does if feel nice?’

  Jeanetta shook her head violently. A drift of stray hair joined the hideous, dead-looking clump on the floor. The puckered face did not know whether to weep, smile or laugh out loud, looked for guidance. How could you, Katherine wanted to shout: How could you do that, why, why, why? She wanted to spit and scratch at him for such a piece of strange, quixotic violence, but he was smiling too, quite unperturbed, like someone looking at a job well done, while she felt like the onlooker at a scene of rape, her own eyes smarting with tears. But another line of magazine script came floating by, something suggesting, if you make a fuss, they make a fuss: cool down emotional situations. Anything for peace. And maybe she was wrong herself to find this barbering obscene. Katherine was never sure of being right, so she kept the encouraging grin affixed to her own face, and slowly, slowly, the little girl copied, smiled back, still uncertain, looking the picture of stoicism. All this passed within a minute.

  ‘Biscuits?’ Jeanetta asked hopefully.

  ‘Daddy’s getting them.’ The words were a challenge, not accompanied by a look. Jeanetta staggered towards mama. They turned their backs on him. Biscuits were produced and even in the task of hugging her daughter without making the occasion seem important enough to warrant extravagant gestures, Katherine wondered where the biscuits had been found.

  ‘We could trim it nicely, round a pudding basin,’ David’s voice suggested from behind her head. His hand came on to the table between them, bearing a dish of biscuits, although these were placed on the polish of the table somewhat abruptly.

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’ She was watching Jeanetta. ‘Time for bed, darling. You shouldn’t have got up.’ The last words were heartfelt, her only hint of hostility. Child nodded, still smiling with her mouth full, grabbing three biscuits and ambling towards the hall. She was unusually good at going back to bed on her own. ‘Sleep tight,’ Katherine called. Uncoordinated feet fell into silence. Katherine slumped back into her chair without looking round.

  ‘Have we finished the wine, darling?’

  ‘Plenty more.’

  He sounded cheerful. She could not bear to look as he swept away curling locks from the pristine marble tiles of their cooking floor. There was the sound of the tap as he rinsed the scissors, while her scalp waited for the same shearing sound of her own hair, the noise of it still resounding through each ear. A fresh glass, full of bubbling white, appeared for himself, while he hummed a tune she did not recognize, filled the dishwashing machine which always confused her, not for the mechanics, simply because she could never see quite why it worked. Sounds of domestic harmony: no trace of the curls. She breathed deeply, glad of these household noises which hid her own subterfuge, mind latching on to one thing, two things, three things. Such as why she had not been quick enough to stop him; gratitude for the fact her own hair remained untouched; relief in his evident playfulness which somehow made everything normal. Don’t fight, she told herself: he wouldn’t take it seriously and he always wins. She looked at the wine, drank a large gulp. Some kind of oblivion, any kind. Please.

  He passed by the chair again, stroked her hair again and they were back as before. Katherine breathed deeply. Everything was going to be all right.

  Sebastian Pearson Thorpe came home, pulled up his Mercedes across the frontage of the Allendales’, led by the light in their kitchen and disappointed to see it go out. He really must tell Susan one of these days about David Allendale, little bit of family history which might amuse her. If he ever could amuse her, or find her awake. He wished the house next door was still alive, a beacon in the road which encouraged him home. There were no signs of life in his own house, which he entered slowly, perspiring in the muggy heat of the early night.

  After he had gone indoors, taking off his city jacket en route, the small, sallow-skinned vagrant shot out from the tree opposite and huddled close to the warm bonnet of the car. To his own damp forehead, sweating in a mild fever while the rest of him was cold, watching the lights go off, one by one, it was not warm at all. But everything was going to be all right. Summer had come, he had heard on a radio in the park. So everything was all right: survival was assured.

  CHAPTER 4

  Mornings had an unpredictable momentum. Katherine found the less she thought about them, the less they mattered and the better they were. Mornings and the prospect of getting away from the house, much as she loved these cool interiors, well, mornings appealed. She felt sane in the mornings. Jeremy’s docility always amazed her: she had no idea babies could be like that and he seemed prepared to make his transition to little boyhood in the same spirit. Good child from birth, born all sweetness and light with a cry of surprise rather than anger although the act of it nearly killed his mother, a fact she could never quite forget. She could guess that he was not always so sweet when she did not see him, which she had to admit was most of the time; also that he played to the gallery of his father, hardly cunning enough at twenty-thre
e months to act out a constant, favourable contrast to Jeanetta, but doing it all the same. Katherine looked at Jeremy’s goodness occasionally with guilty irritation. He was so easy to love, but on behalf of his sister and herself, she resented him.

  Jeanetta, on the other hand, was pulled into clothes half an hour before breakfast, screaming throughout. She had not wanted to relinquish the flannelette pyjamas in which she had been delivered home: they were roomy and comfortable although the length of leg impeded progress, perfectly adequate wear for a warm, early summer day, and even without such conclusions in her small mind, she could see no reason whatever to transfer her fat little body into anything else less amenable. The elastic of her own cotton trousers bit into the rolls of her stomach and the knees were worn thin. Her T-shirt rode up over her waist, carrying the vest beneath it and adding to her bulk. The head shoved through the neck of the shirt was haloed by ash-blonde curls, short, horribly uneven, but still unmistakably hers and the face beneath was already pink and mottled, the translucent skin no disguise for the morning’s extreme emotions.

  ‘Do your teeth, darling, please, just for Mummy, Please.’ There was a pact they were honouring so far. Everything as normal, even with half the hair.

  ‘Won’t . . . Why? Why can’t I have my pyjamas?’

  ‘They aren’t my pyjamas, I mean your pyjamas, they’re Mark’s pyjamas . . .’

  ‘He said I could have them.’

  ‘No, darling, his mummy doesn’t think so. Now do your teeth. Nice breakfast in a minute.’

  Nice breakfast the battleground to follow. Katherine looked at Jeanetta with a mixture of perplexity and panic, uncomfortably aware that the pyjamas, which Jeanetta would now insist came to breakfast as a talisman before personal return to their owner, were one of three such pairs, to say nothing of the toys treated in the same way. Clearly no good: the child would have to have more clothes before anyone else saw fit to mention it. What with these clothes and the shorn hair, she looked like a product of a refugee camp even though sheer weight denied any notion of want.

  ‘Come on, come on . . .’ Then a cunning threat, ‘You’ll miss cornflakes if you don’t hurry.’ Jeanetta sulked into action, pretending a sloth she could never quite maintain in the face of food; then propelled herself downstairs with a force and a shout which made Katherine wince. The banister rail was polished mahogany transported from another house at vast expense. Once a week Katherine restored the nicks and scratches inflicted by Jeanetta’s progress and once a month shampooed the carpet where Jeanetta’s tracks took chocolate, gummy sweets and left-over meals, Katherine powerless to stop her. Jeremy had been carried down by his father, chattering in his make-believe words, the two dark heads together discussing their breakfast in calm, orderly tones, David’s full of amusement, Jeremy economical with his few real syllables.

  ‘Onge, Daddy?’ He meant juice. ‘No, yellow Daddy. Isn’t Daddy silly?’ David’s chuckle rose up with this reply of his own to greet the other two.

  Father and son were well ensconced in the kitchen, David with his padding acolyte trotting round at his heels, chuntering like a train, understanding nothing of Thomas the Tank Engine which David read to him, but imitating the noise in lieu of words, a sound quietly expressive of contentment. He was tall for his age, promising the height of his six-foot-tall papa, the uncanny resemblance between them prominent in all other features from skin colour to the mutual texture of their thick hair. Somehow Jeremy had missed out on the plump stage of babyhood, the bulge of his nappy remaining the only protuberance carried behind with a kind of pomp, while Jeanetta had always resembled a statue of Buddha. She sat on her own chair at the refectory table, raised to the height of it by cushions under her ample bottom, looking like one big cushion with her chest absorbed into her tummy which settled on to thighs resembling diminutive tree trunks. Her chin merged with the moon of her pale face; there were two pink spots on her cheeks, the skin elsewhere white. Katherine quickly brushed the truncated golden curls while the child was half captive in the chair. To do otherwise, when Jeanetta was free to kick as well as grab and memory of last night’s outrage came back to roost, was out of the question, bringing into Katherine’s morning mind the knowledge of her own hopelessness. Child had inherited from the paternal side a will of iron, a love of confrontations from the day of her birth and every single day since, rendering her mother weak with frustration.

  ‘Want yogot.’

  ‘Want yoghurt, Please.’

  ‘Please c’n I yave yogot?’ She had picked up intonations of speech from the Harrisons in her years of daily existence with them. They seemed to suit her and at least Mrs Harrison, or was it Mr, distilled in her some beginnings of manners. ‘You got to fight with them Ps and Qs, Mrs All’dale,’ she said to Katherine when thanked for her efforts. ‘Never comes natural in any child, you know. Not even ones who don’t say boo to gooses.’ Meaning, of course, Jeanetta boos everything. Guilty Katherine had taken in the hint of criticism implied by the tone although it had been no more than an observation, one of Mrs Harrison’s vain attempts to engage conversation, but she had remembered the Ps and Qs later. Now she corrected most of Jeanetta’s words and found to her surprise that the ploy occasionally worked. Especially if the bribe was edible. Nothing else about her inept, panic-stricken mothering seemed to succeed.

  David fed Jeremy, who sat in his high chair consuming a smooth white mixture with minimum fuss, David scooping the surplus from the chin with each withdrawal of the spoon while the child frowned in concentration. Jeanetta mixed strawberry yoghurt with her favourite cornflakes, spilling the sugar she added with a look of defiance at her mother. Mummy did not like sugar, but did not prevent daughter. She had not forgotten the cutting of the curls, felt she was owed. With sweet taste in mouth, Jeanetta was as happy as she had been as a baby with sugar in the bottle. So tempting to give her what she wanted, even while knowing better. ‘You’ve given that child a problem for life,’ Mary had bawled, reading straight from a textbook. ‘How can you say that, she loves it,’ Katherine had said, furiously resentful. Leave me alone; if I take anyone’s advice it won’t be yours. But Jeanetta still loved sugar; sugar was peace at breakfast, withdrawal the opposite. Apart from the noisy business of crushing cornflakes into yoghurt to make a concoction of psychedelic colours, all was serene.

  ‘You look a bit tired, darling. Are you going to work?’

  Katherine looked up in surprise. ‘Yes, of course. I’m expected. Ten o’clock as usual. Why?’

  ‘Just wondered.’

  It irritated her, this almost daily litany. Of course she was going to work, but the mere question made it seem as if work was a movable feast, not a commitment of any importance to be avoided whenever inconvenient as soon as he voiced his preference for her to stay at home. Katherine took work seriously even though it was only three hours per day watching Mr Isaacs’ exclusive shop, talking nicely to the customers, displaying rich wares to the rich, losing herself in the window displays as she stood watching the world pass by. The shop was another world, full of the things she loved, but of course it would have been better if Mr Isaacs had not been a friend and customer of David, so that by some strange quid pro quo arrangement she had to accept, while not understanding why, payment for her services went into David’s account rather than directly to herself. Better for tax, he said, handing back to her the approximation of her earnings. Why, she had asked, closing her fist round a pathetically small bundle of notes. ‘Listen, darling, trust me, you know what you’re like with the stuff, this is the best way, OK?’ Then kissed her lightly, smoothing the long hair back over her shoulders, rewarding her agreement in advance with one of his seductive smiles. She had smiled back, OK. All for the best, he was probably right although she was sick of smiling. Difficult to answer while she knew how money slid through her hands like water, leaving no trace. Extravagance; impossible to explain where it went; she never quite knew and the knowledge of that was acutely uncomfortable.

  Wh
ile she sat now at the breakfast table, avoiding a view of the hair, she caught sight of Jeanetta’s T-shirt again, rucked up to show pale, round stomach. The child leered at her, pink cereal mixture displayed on white teeth. Jeanetta’s star performance, showing them exactly what she was eating. Clothes for Jeanetta, Oh bloody, bloody hell. Jeanetta turned her multicoloured mouth to display to David. He neither smiled nor reacted. ‘Don’t do that, darling, please,’ Katherine murmured, reaching for the coffee. Jeanetta tried once more, turning her wide-open jaws towards Jeremy, who rewarded her with a stare of blank astonishment. Disappointed, she turned back to the mixture, snorting loudly and clattering the spoon violently in the bowl. Splatters of pink fell on to the polished wood. Automatically, Katherine wiped them with a cloth held in the opposite hand to her coffee cup. She ate nothing.

  ‘And after work?’ David continued.

  ‘What? Oh, gym, I expect, as usual.’ Such a good excuse for doing nothing, wandering round. ‘I’ll be back quite early. We’ve got the Neills this evening, haven’t we, and the Loreans and Fosters coming in for a drink? Wait a minute, not so early. I’ve got to meet my sister, just for an hour. About four o’clock, have to check my diary, shouldn’t take long.’

  ‘Why don’t you get her to come here?’

  ‘I thought you didn’t like her coming here.’

  ‘Whatever gave you that idea? I don’t mind at all. I’ll be working anyway so I’m not likely to notice. Don’t you mean she doesn’t like coming here?’

  Katherine was immediately confused as to what she did think, distracted by Jeanetta’s head. At this point she did not wish to say that actually, Mary liked coming here, rather too much. Well worth the ducking and diving to meet Mary on neutral territory. She only had to look at the cream walls, the rich kitchen and the armchairs to remind herself why. ‘Another new chair then?’ Mary would say. ‘Why do you need that?’ and Katherine would feel her own skin tingle. There was enough to feel guilty about without adding a tyrant like Mary, charity director, great preacher of the virtues of poverty. And then there was the business of always having to feel grateful to Mary. Everyone said Mary had been so good to her, but long before she had married and escaped the spartan flat they had shared, Katherine had been sick to death of Mary being good to her. Mary always knows best, nag, nag, nag, and hadn’t she shown her. ‘Mary’s so kind to you,’ David reminded. So horribly true. Armed with a small inheritance from her own adoptive parents, conscious of having done better in their lottery of life, ever prudent Mary had bought a flat and plucked her sixteen-year-old sister from the last of many messy hostels after the last of four sets of foster parents. Terrific. Gratitude, which Katherine was hard pressed to feel, was as corrosive as the accusation that it had all been her fault, something she felt without suggestion. So getting married had a lot going for it, including showing two fingers to Mary and all that worthiness. Mary always knows everything, always knows best, but I don’t need you any more, I’m the king of the castle, la da di da da. All that. Mary in this house might spot the cracks in the fabric, wheedle her way through and Katherine could not bear that. Mary was everything she had left behind and she hid from prying Mary.