The Commonplace Day
Page 1
Praise for Rosemary Friedman
‘Delightful and easily read’ – Weekly Scotsman
‘Writes well about human beings’ – Books and Bookmen
‘Accomplished, zestful and invigorating’ – TLS
‘A funny and perceptive book’ – Cosmopolitan
‘A confident, sensitive and marvellously satisfying novel’ – The Times
‘A classic of its kind’ – The Standard
‘Readers will find it as affecting as it is intelligent’ – Financial Times
‘Adroitly and amusingly handled’ – Daily Telegraph
‘An entertaining read’ – Financial Times
‘Highly recommended for the sheer pleasure it gives’ – Literary Review
‘Observant and well composed’ – TLS
‘A pleasing comedy of manners’ – Sunday Telegraph
‘What a story, what a storyteller!’ – Daily Mail
For
PRISCILLA,
with love
No day is commonplace if we had only eyes to see its splendour.
EMERSON
Life consists in what man is thinking of all day.
EMERSON
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
PART ONE
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
PART TWO
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
About the Author
BY THE SAME AUTHOR ALSO ON EBOOK BY ARCADIA BOOKS
Copyright
PART ONE
One
I woke at seven and thought stewing steak and ring about the cooker then turned over and went to sleep again. The next thing I knew was the slight click of saucer on glass, my cup of tea, and Tim saying come on it’s half-past and feeling sorry for myself having to get up as though I hadn’t had a wink of sleep, although in fact I’d been out for the count since quarter to eleven.
It was always the same, the feeling of resentment and that if left in peace I would sleep contentedly until doomsday; except on Sundays when I didn’t have to get up, no school or anything, and Tim prepared his own breakfast, and I’d be awake at seven bright as a button and raring to go, nowhere.
Foggy, he said, pulling the curtains back but I knew because it had drifted into the room and the back of my throat was lumpy from breathing it in all night. It wasn’t cold because ignoring the fuel merchant’s plea to ‘buy a bigger bunker’, we’d had central-heating installed, unable to let the rest of the ‘village’ bang and clank and heave out their soot-ridden boilers without us. The new boiler came on automatically at 6.30 and shunted merrily in its little garden house until with a sudden shudder it would stop and into the quiet Tim would say, It’s vibrating, needs cleaning, must ring old Jellaby; he’d done the whole road and we were his family, his children, but of course the day would go by and neither of us would do anything about it.
The tea was a joke really because Tim came from a tea-drinking family and I did not. I’d been married for seventeen years and still disliked making tea for my in-laws. It was either too weak or too strong or too thin, not enough body, or you hadn’t shaken the milk bottle properly, or there was, horror of horrors, a leaf, I could never find the strainer; and even if the brew was right, which was rare, there was the question of temperature. It had to be hot but not too hot. There were so many permutations that it was almost impossible to hit on just the correct formula for the Légion d’honneur of the tea-drinkers’ union the acclaim of the ‘nice cup’. I never began to understand, probably I did not want to; that was why Tim always made his own.
The joke part came in with my cup which Tim set religiously on the bedside table each morning at 7.30. If I was indifferent to tea during the day, before breakfast I actively loathed the stuff. I always heaved myself up and took one sip, like medicine, and flopped back on to the pillow, exhausted, waiting for the stimulant effect I firmly believed it to possess. Sometimes I tried to multiply seventeen by the number of days in a year, less fifty-two Sundays, in an attempt to work out how many gallons or bathfuls or reservoirs of tea I had poured down the sink since we’d been married. It always became too involved and I got lost, like with Robin’s homework when the men and the shovels and the earth they had to remove in the requisite number of days became confused, and I gave up.
Tim had the newspaper under his arm and went into the bathroom and I heard him turn on the water. I always waited for the sound of it before I relinquished the last vestige of semi-consciousness and unwillingly I arose, like Venus from the foam, and took my sip.
I allowed myself five minutes, aware that it was a luxury. Some women were up at six or even 5.30 with a day’s work done before I opened my eyes. Perhaps they didn’t think, I told myself, when, after all, did they have time? Up for the household chores, out to work, back for more chores, no energy remaining except perhaps for telly and bed. Probably it was just as well, not thinking I mean, although I knew it was the what-might-have-been fantasies, indulged in in these moments of quiet, that kept me sane. Sane. Well enough of sanity remaining to have managed to date without the pills and visits to the analyst upon which Martha was now quite dependent, and without the shock therapy which was no longer a remote mystique belonging to psychiatry but something that actually happened to people one knew. True there were the small blue capsules, the thin edge, I often imagined, of the wedge. I was unable to sleep without them but on most nights I did not need to take them. This paradox was due to the fact that although I only took them when I knew that the following day was to bring some particular stress I felt unable to cope with unaided, I had to know that they were there, available if necessary. The comforting sight of the smoky brown bottle next to the bed would ensure a good night’s sleep secure in the knowledge that if the teeming brain refused to close down for the night the remedy was at hand. It sounds terribly neurotic. Heather who went to keep-fit with all those sweaty women, shopped at the Health Food Stores, and said they mixed antibiotics with the cattle-cake and all our food was contaminated, said that it was. Tim said Heather was just as neurotic, unable to live without her daily-dozen and wheat germ and all that, and that there was nothing to choose between us.
I was a pillow reformer. I never got between the cold sheets at night, Tim wouldn’t have an electric blanket, without reminding myself of those lacking one blanket, let alone four and a quilted Terylene eiderdown, and dwelt often upon the plight of the pot-bellied, stick-armed waifs who looked appealingly out from the Oxfam advertisements. We sent parcels, of course, all of us in the ‘village’ did, Robin and Diana’s cast-offs, and raised money in our various ways. We never really ‘did’ anything though; not like it used to be. The Spanish Civil War for instance when people actually went to fight or be nurses, or even our own war when older sisters nonchalantly drove ambulances, undeterred by falling bombs. Things had changed. You raised money and sent your old shirt when it was no longer any use to you. You read the papers and clucked with sympathy but you never physically responded to causes. Our lot did not, at any rate. There were those, of course, plenty of them, who in an excess of King Canute-ism were willing to march under tolerably difficult conditions and to sit down in defiance of the law in a misguided attempt to stem the tide of the nuclear era. Always, though, they cohered in nice cosy little hundreds where nothing more terrible than a fine or a few unco
mfortable nights in prison was likely to occur, and those in good, worthy company. Possibly it was a naïve concept to imagine that the only helping hand was the one which literally filled the empty bowl in some remote corner of the earth. The money had, after all, to be raised, the organisation administered, which would send the man, pay for the food, which went into the bowl. A great many cogs were necessary but were there not too many, myself among them, standing impotently in the midst of paperweights whose walls were not glass, but the comforts and good living to which we had gradually become conditioned? The thousand and one aids to existence swirled round us like snow and outside this cosmos of our own creating survival was impossible. I pictured the ultimate cataclysm as the final smashing, atomically if you like, of the millions of these insulated paperweights from which those who did not succumb would crawl slowly, naked, innocent as they were born, to do what they would with their second chances. This again was probably ingenuous. We never would live in a world fit for heroes, nor fight the war to end all wars. These were clichés coined for the benefit of the mutilated and the bereaved, and had little to do with reality which would mutilate and bereave as long as it chose.
“It’s twenty-five to,” Tim said, “and Diana can’t find her stockings.” He looked with resignation at the cup. “You haven’t drunk your tea.”
He said it every morning. It really was time to leave the impossible state the world had got itself into and deal with the minor universe in which I could do some tiny good even if it was only to find Diana’s stockings.
They were in the airing cupboard as I’d thought they would be. She hadn’t troubled to move anything and they were hidden by her swimming towel.
She was sitting in bed in her vest, beneath the vacuous faces of the latest pop group, reading.
“You didn’t look.”
She jabbed a finger on the page. “I did. Where were they?”
“If you’d taken the trouble to move something …” It was an old record and I sensed her ears automatically closing, saw her eyes slide back to the book. She’d surrounded herself with shirt, tunic, tie, knickers, everything even to her cardigan and slunk back to bed. I was about to make the speech concerning open windows and stripped beds and brisk dressing but the very thought of it made me shudder, anyway it was foggy, so I just said, “Hurry, you’ll be late,” and left her to it.
It was cold in the kitchen. Lower temperature humph humph, Mr Jellaby said, heat of the cooker supplements the rad; but the cooker wasn’t cooking first thing in the morning and it was always bleak. There were puddles of tea left by Tim on the canary yellow Formica tops, an empty bottle of gin put out last night after Martha and Jack, the bird’s nest of brown paper straw from a chocolate box, yesterday’s newspapers.
I let up the grey venetian blinds, mopped up the tea with a clammy Wettex, and switched the hot-plate on for the porridge. The table in the dinette with its trailing-ivy wallpaper was already set. I always did what I could the night before being at my absolute worst in the mornings. I could hardly blame Diana. There was really something in it. I’d read it in the Reader’s Digest. Something to do with body temperatures and how some people’s was at its lowest in the mornings. They were almost in a state of hibernation. It summed me up exactly.
The cooker was new, or had been almost a year ago when it was delivered with a chip in the enamel top. We complained to the retailer who said he would contact the manufacturer and see that a new top was delivered right away. Right away. Weeks rolled by, then it was Christmas, Madam, and the factory closed. After that they really were sending someone to inspect the damage and replace the part but they had trouble with the vans, maintenance or something, then the particular top for our model was out of stock for the moment, then the summer holidays intervened. They were closed once more, then we were away. I forgot to chase them up when we returned and now, fantastic as it appeared, it was getting round to Christmas again. I put the saucepan on the hotplate. I had grown used to the chip. I was fed up with telephoning, waiting for the right man in the right department, hardly cared now if they brought a new top or not; it was not after all a very big chip. Tim insisted though, the thing was new, had been at any rate, and you couldn’t accept shoddy stuff it was expensive enough. It was shoddy too; the inside of the oven was almost impossible to clean the finish was so poor. I remembered my mother’s cooker, an enormous old thing, grey, not white and shiny like ours. She’d had it for years and years and years and the surface was impeccable, diamond hard, and only needed a wipe. It was the same with the refrigerator constructed of fiddly plastic compartments saying ‘butter’ and ‘cheese’, only after the first few weeks you didn’t bother, which snapped at the slightest provocation. Similarly with everything. The American idea really, we were becoming more and more like the Americans. Everything had to be changed every five minutes for new models, nothing was made to endure. You were constantly in a state of replacing something, aided in your choice by the glossy ads, in accordance with the theory of obsolescence.
I felt something hard and painful in the small of my back.
“Go and sit down, Robin, breakfast is almost ready.”
He put the revolver on the fridge, not gently, another scratch.
“Have the papers come?”
“I suppose so.”
“Where are they?”
“Upstairs.”
“Did they send my comic?”
“Better ask Daddy. Not now. It’s ready. You’ll be late.”
“Won’t be a mo.”
I put his bowl on the table. “Tell Diana to hurry.”
Diana had bought me a gadget called a ‘Forget-me-not’ for my birthday. It was made of red plastic and hung on the wall with green pegs which you manoeuvred to point to the item of shopping you required. It was a composite list beginning with bacon, and ending, through disinfectant and puddings, with vegs. The only trouble was that either I never remembered to put the appropriate peg down or Robin, unwittingly or deliberately, manipulated them in all directions indicating that we were in need of bleach or sausages when we were nothing of the kind.
Ignoring this aide-memoire I wrote stewing steak, veg, pots, on the back of one of Tim’s letters and looking in the vegetable cupboard added mush, toms and, as a gallant afterthought at the trouble I was going to, flaky pastry. I ought really to order something for tomorrow while I was at it but couldn’t think, wishing as usual that they’d invent some new kind of food. There were different recipes, of course, and cuts, and in my chi-chi moods which came every so often, I went specially to Harrods or Soho for sprigs of rosemary or blades of mace. Once I even bought a pestle and mortar, which we used now as an ashtray in the bathroom, because I saw a picture of the Hon. Mrs Somebody or other in her herby Knightsbridge kitchen, knocking up a little dinner party for ten in her best dress and pearls, and saying you simply couldn’t get the authentic flavour unless you pestle-and-mortared it yourself. On that particular occasion Tim said what on earth have you done to the beef and, my God you didn’t open the ’57 Burgundy, anything but the ’57, I was keeping that for old Bland, you know how he is about wines. There had been other phases; trout with almonds and tiny little vol-au-vents. It was a particularly cold night and Tim said, No soup? and in spite of myself I delivered a speech about trying to make you something different, to add a little variety, and he said it’s very good I only asked if there was any soup. I said it’s taken me all the afternoon and you don’t even care, all you want is soup. I merely asked if there was soup. I don’t know what you’re getting all excited about. I’m not getting excited. Tears and recriminations then, mostly because I’d let the vol-au-vent mixture catch when Martha phoned and I knew you could taste it.
Robin spread his comic over Tim’s place and started on his porridge.
“Did you tell Diana?”
“What?”
“To hurry.”
“Didn’t tell me to.”
“I did. You never listen. Take your elbows off.”
“What are you screaming for?” Tim leaned over the banisters in his bathrobe.
“Tell Diana breakfast is getting cold.”
“Have you seen my cuff-links?”
“I may have put them in the laundry box. You have others.”
“I don’t like the others. I wish you wouldn’t.”
“Sorry. Tell Diana.”
She came down without washing her face.
“Do you like my hair like this?”
It drooped like a curtain on both sides with no parting, flicking up at the ends. At eighteen it would have been stunning, at twelve she looked a minx.
“I’d be more impressed if you’d washed.”
“I did!”
“What with?” Robin said.
“Mind your own business.”
He didn’t lift his head from his comic. “It couldn’t have been soap because I took it for my experiment.”
“Molly Valentine’s bought her parents a house,” Diana said. “She’s Top of the Pops.”
I thought I’d recognised the hairstyle.
“We get our Science back today.”
I made the coffee. “The one Daddy tested you on?”
“Yes. He got my profit and loss wrong on Friday. He said put it on top and you’re supposed to put it underneath.”
“If you did it yourself you’d have nothing to grumble about. You aren’t supposed to have help.”
“I couldn’t do them.”
“You must have had it explained.”
“She goes over it too quickly.”
“Surely you can ask if you don’t understand.”
She gave me a withering look from beneath the hair. “I’d look a proper nit.”
“It’s better to look a ‘nit’ surely…”
It was not. Since my day the old order had changed. Everything had changed; for better or worse I don’t know but there were few points of similarity. At school we had been a mixed bunch taking life casually, not battling with gritted teeth against top people as Diana had to in the school we’d been lucky to get her into. In my class there had been Kate, I remember, whose father was a film director, who got the most appalling marks, Joyce who never managed to master even simple equations, but painted like an angel. June who was a superb mimic and kept us and the staff in stitches, Hazel who won us every netball match with her shooting, and Pam who never could get her tongue round the French verbs no matter how much Mamselle shouted. There were a few ‘dead keens’. Barbara, with her thick glasses devoid of humour, Anne whose parents were physicists, Jean dead set on biochemistry. We worked, of course, at times we had to, but life was not so intense; not like it was for Diana who had been brainwashed with ideas of her own importance at getting into the school and instilled with an urgent need to fight her way to the top. She took too little time to laugh, to sing, to play; how could she with the ultimate disgrace, like the sword of Damocles, constantly over her head, the fear of being made to look a ‘nit’.