The Commonplace Day

by Rosemary Friedman

  “I don’t think he’d be terribly pleased.”

  “He wouldn’t know. It would probably be short-lived.”

  “Playing with fire, Liz. You never know what kind of a conflagration you’re starting.”

  “Dobbie, if you aren’t interested just say so.”

  “You know quite well I’ve always wanted you. Been half in love in a way; sharing you with Tim without the responsibilities.”

  “Sometimes I think it’s the responsibilities that kill.” I handed him his coffee and the sugar, coloured crystals.

  “They’re supposed to enrich.”

  “Tell me what you see enriching about mortgages and a chip in the cooker and the roots of our poplar tree undermining the foundations of the house next door.”

  “I’ve never known you so cynical.”

  “You’ve never known me. You’ve watched me do my act, Tim and the children…”

  “I thought it was part of you.”

  “If you play it for long enough it becomes part of you. Only part. There’s another part though, the part that’s free to roam. It does too. We live in a divided world; what we’re doing and we’re thinking; women at any rate. They aren’t the same you know. If you want out just say so.”

  “I suppose I should get up and go. Regards to Tim etcetera, called away.”

  “You aren’t going to?”

  I was afraid for a moment.

  “No.”

  Suddenly it was over. The situation I had dreamed on, thought over night and day was under way. Dobbie stood up and I stood up too, the coffee cooling. For a moment we were immobilised on the black and white carpet I had chosen for not showing the dirt, hedged by the Liberty’s coffee table and the black sofa with its scatter cushions. I felt disgusted with myself for a moment only then that this was what I had been waiting for and we moved together. It was everything I expected and transported me as I had forgotten one could be transported. I didn’t think I could wait until we came back from Italy to see him again and had wild ideas of sending myself a telegram to come home, from Martha or someone, but of course it would be impossible. In his arms I tried not to think of Tim and make comparisons but just enjoy it. For the first time I sensed the danger of the whole thing and that it wasn’t going to be quite as easy as I thought. My legs felt weak.

  When we released each other, with reluctance, Dobbie said: “If you like we could call that one on the house; without prejudice.”

  There was time still to make a joke of it, he meant, for Tim and I to close the doors of our nest snug with Robin and Diana and an occasional visit from Dobbie to liven us all up.

  In reply I put my arms round his neck and let everything else fade. He was like granite, not like Tim, slight when you held him.

  The conflagration was truly under way. I moved from him feeling odd still in a way I hadn’t for years and Dobbie lit a cigarette from the slim gold case inside which I knew he carried a photograph of himself, younger and slimmer as a Wing-Commander.

  “It looks as though we’re in business,” he said. “What shall we do until Tim comes back.”

  I knew what he meant. To keep ourselves occupied. There was an invisible magnet pulling us together. I didn’t look at him so that I could stay on the other side of the room.

  “Talk, I suppose.” My hand was shaking, the coffee cold. “Tell me about the Middle East.”

  The door opened and Diana came in yawning. She and Robin had had an early supper because they were doing Great Expectations on television and they wanted to watch. I’d forgotten about them.

  “Hallo, Uncle Dobbie.”

  “Good play?”

  “Mm.”

  “I was going to tell Mummy about my trip.”

  She went naturally to sit on his knee. Suddenly there was something wrong. I went into the kitchen to take the dishes out of the dishwasher although I usually left them until morning.

  It was the divided world again; the greater part belonging to Tim and the children, the lesser, which I knew I would never relinquish, to myself. I was aware of this dichotomy then, when I saw my child sitting on Dobbie’s knee confusing the separate images and I was aware of it now as I sat before the mirror on the day of the culmination, or perhaps the real beginning of my affair with Dobbie.

  I had made up my face with precision while allowing my thoughts to wander. Downstairs I could hear Mrs Mac busy with the Hoover and remembered that before I left I must sort out the washing and put it in the machine; she wouldn’t touch it, too complicated she said, hers was simpler.

  In the bathroom I took the mascara in its slim blue box from the cupboard above the mirror. The light was better here than in the bedroom and I could see the triangular web of lines at the corners of my eyes against which Harrods sold a cream at thirty-five guineas a jar. I wasn’t that foolish realising their inevitability but I suppose my eyes were slightly misted with the hope that blinded the others because only last week I had paid fourteen and six for a tube of something that promised to make the crow’s feet less evident.

  Looking critically I thought perhaps I had plastered it on a bit for first thing only I wouldn’t have the chance to come home again before going to Dobbie’s. It may only have been that I was slightly pale with fright, anticipation, and that the make-up sat awkwardly upon the pallor.

  I was holding up a black wool dress and a tweed suit and looking out of the window trying to decide which, to take off, I told myself nervously, when Mrs Mac came in and said you’ll want to wrap up it’s nasty. She was holding something in her hand.

  It was the Limoges ashtray Tim had brought back from a business trip to Paris. It was in two halves.

  It came to pieces in her hands Mrs Mac said, naturally she didn’t even touch it.

  I took the two pieces of pink and white china. The ashtray was pretty but of no particular value. I was glad I did not believe in symbolism.

  Five

  Even on this day of intrigue the shopping had to be done. Thus, as always, women were reduced, cut down to size, had greatness whittled away. Not that I was contemplating an increase in stature; a decrease, morally speaking. It would have been the same though if I had been. Could you be great, painting, writing, while around you mouths were open for food? Mountain climbing certainly not; athletics, a few made it, exchanging dedication for life. We were foiled at every turn; by margarine and assorted biscuits and quarters of tea. Après moi le déluge. First there was dinner to think of.

  My relationship with our local supermarket was of the love / hate variety. I shopped there because of the time saved by being able to get a diversity of items under one roof. Often though I’d come out with caviare-style lump-fish roe or a jar of lime pickle, having gone in for an innocent loaf.

  I don’t know who chose the music to which we rejected and selected our purchases but imagined that the tunes were chosen for their soporific rather than aesthetic qualities. One had to stop oneself from a hypnotic trance induced by a purring rendering of Night and Day, from reaching out, dream-like, for tins of ground jeera or push-button lavatory deodorant one had had no intention of buying. I hated the big brothers I knew were sitting behind the glass panel high on the back wall which on our unsuspecting side was mirror, spying on me, waiting for me to slip the baked beans into my own basket instead of theirs and cover them up with my scarf (shoplifters always had scarves). I was not, as they had calculated, much good at sales resistances. To the lilting rhythm of The Skater’s Waltz I invariably succumbed to the juicy appeal of canned apricots at a reduction of threepence and raspberry jelly for Robin, three for the price of two.

  Today they were playing The Lady is a Tramp interrupted at intervals by a raucous voice calling, “Mr Calthorpe, telephone, please”. I walked resolutely past the Potage aux Champignons, reduced to a shilling, towards the meat and poultry at the far end of the store. At the delicatessen I faltered, Odysseus lured off course by the pungent odour of ripe Camembert; no Circe displayed her charms more invitingly. On the
counter the farmhouse Brie on its bed of straw oozed creamily, the shiny black olives, Tim’s favourite, glistened against a background of hanging Bologna sausages. I hesitated, to a seductive rendering of Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered (someone had a sense of humour), then thought that by tonight I would be technically guilty of the offence I had already committed mentally and was honest enough, honest! not to allow myself to bring offerings in expiation; not that Tim would know; would ever know.

  Down the aisle between the fish fingers, Robin inevitably remarked he didn’t know a fish had fingers, and the cream, double and single, then a smart about turn, catching my shins on someone’s wretched basket as I remembered flaky pastry and that I was going to put the steak into a pie. Tim of course thought I still made my own pastry, rolling it and putting it into the fridge for five minutes then rolling it again and had no idea that it came called ‘Roll-Easy’ all prepared in a tinfoil packet. I put one into my basket and somebody said hallo Liz and it was Monica clutching her basket with a bottle of Handy-Andy, fourpence off, sticking out and a jumbo tin of grapefruit juice, and Olga Tindal clutching hers. Most of the girls in the village hunted in pairs. Neither term, girl nor village, was strictly accurate. All of us were veering towards the forties, some more some less, and where we lived was one of those high-class suburbs not far from town which we thought we endowed with a little character, or perhaps it was because of the gossip that went on and there was plenty of that, by calling the twenty-or thirty-odd streets with their larger or smaller detached houses our ‘village’.

  They were both looking at me and I couldn’t think why then I remembered I had on my black coat with the mink tie Tim had bought me for my birthday and stiletto heels and that it must look a bit odd with the wire basket and the flaky pastry.

  “I’m going up to town,” I said, dropping two little pieces of my alibi. “Meeting Martha for lunch.”

  “Have they any frozen raspberries?” Monica said. “There was a recipe in Queen, I was reading it in the hairdresser’s and copied it out on the back of my cheque-book.” She fumbled in her handbag and produced it. “Frozen raspberries, unsweetened, meringue case.”

  “You put a little cornflour and vinegar into the meringue mixture,” Olga said, “it’s called a Pavlova.”

  A woman wheeling a trolley piled with tins pushed by with a toddler saying, “Mum! Mum! Mummy!”

  “Anyway,” Monica was bent over the fridge, “it doesn’t look as if they have any raspberries. Gooseberries or strawberries. Reggie hates gooseberries and strawberries bring me out in bumps.”

  “Mushrooms do that to me,” Olga said. She picked up a packet of frozen herring-roes.

  “Reggie won’t touch frozen fish,” Monica said. “He doesn’t mind vegetables.”

  “Can he tell the difference?” Olga said helping herself to peas and sprouts. “I give Archie roes on toast twice a week for breakfast and I’ve never enlightened him.”

  “Reggie’s very fussy about that sort of thing.” I caught Olga’s eye. “He gets it from his mother. She’s one of the old-fashioned sort, goes to the butcher’s and prods it all. If it wasn’t labelled I wouldn’t know one cut from the next. I got a chart from the Daily Telegraph once and hung it on the larder door. It had a bull, coloured and divided into sections. The trouble was I couldn’t understand the key. Are you coming for coffee?”

  She meant the ‘Papagallo’ where most of the village could be found at eleven o’clock sitting at the tables by the window shredding the reputations of all who passed and eating Danish pastries with Saxin in the capuccino.

  “I want to look for a dress for Pamela’s wedding,” I said.

  “I haven’t a thing,” Olga said. “Tessa’s getting herself up in red velvet, she simply hasn’t a clue. I suppose she thinks as mother of the bride she has to be outstanding.”

  “She’ll be that all right,” Monica said. “Have you sent a present yet?”

  “Can I come by?” The woman with the loaded trolley and the toddler was retracing her steps.

  “Mum, Mum, Mummy,” the child said.

  “Oh, shut up, do!”

  “It’s supposed to be one way,” Olga pointed out.

  The woman looked at her ocelot jacket and pushed on.

  “I thought one of those Pyrex oven sets, but Reggie says something silver,” Monica said. “I was thinking of the cleaning.”

  “You’ve always got silver,” Olga said. She had a maid to clean it.

  “There’s so much to choose,” Monica said. “Do you remember when we got married?”

  I thought of the plain white cups and saucers and the ghastly utility bed.

  A tall man in a bowler hat who had taken one of the very tiny baskets and looked ludicrous said: “I wonder if you could tell me where I can find the Puffed Wheat?” to Olga. Olga smiling, gave him the works, eyes, teeth, everything. I think it was a reflex stimulated by the male and came naturally. “Over by the wall,” she said.

  We had all got married within a few years of the end of the war. Our wedding dresses had been made of any material we were lucky enough to find and not of our choice and our homes had been similarly furnished. Pamela Talbot had the world at her feet; in our day there had been no coloured oven-to-table ware, king-sized bed linen, Terylene eiderdowns. It was a world we had almost forgotten.

  “Did you hear about my biff?” Monica said. “In the car. Reggie’s furious. I was taking the corner of Chestnut and Beech and this fellow came round absolutely on the wrong side, not stopping and of course I went smack into him. He wasn’t a bit nice but fortunately the postman was on the corner emptying the box and saw everything and said it wasn’t my fault. I don’t think Reggie believed him and anyway the wing is a horrid mess and I shan’t have the car for three weeks.”

  We were lost without our cars. None of us was used to standing at bus stops and couldn’t get through the day if we had to. If the women in the village didn’t have their own cars they used their husbands’ while they went to town on the tube; there was nowhere to park anyway. Most of us had children who had to be taken and fetched if not from school to music or dancing or Guides or Cubs or extra coaching. When we were small we hadn’t been chauffeured anywhere, but our children were used to it. They regarded with horror any distance to be footed greater than half a mile.

  “I just grazed one of the doors a few weeks ago,” Olga said. “No, it must have been last month because it was the day before Claire’s birthday and I was dashing out to buy place-cards. It was the tiniest little graze but apparently it had to resprayed, thirty pounds, but Archie knew a chap who does it privately and he took the whole door off and it’s like new for half that money.”

  “They just put it on,” Monica said. “Like with the television. We lost the picture on the bedroom one, and the chap said new tube, tube’s gone, and you don’t really know if it has or not.”

  “That’s why Archie rents ours.”

  “It’s far more expensive, Reggie says.”

  “Yes but at least you get twenty-four-hour service.”

  I wondered what we should have for dessert and thought perhaps ice-cream and then that it would melt because I wasn’t going home and picked up a double cream and reminded myself to get a tin of fruit cocktail on the way out.

  “I have to get some meat,” I said.

  “We have too.”

  We shuffled with our two lots of baskets each, our own and Betterfare’s, towards the end canopied counters, where butchers in spotless white aprons presided over the tripe and chuck steak. The cuts were arranged prettily in plastic containers covered with cellophane and looked like the pretend food with which as children we had once played dolls’ houses. I hesitated between a pound-and-a-half and two pounds. Sometimes the children came in ravenous and sometimes not hungry at all. Robin often went to bed with just some cereal. I decided on the two pounds, I could always finish up what was left for lunch tomorrow, and put it in the wire basket. Then I thought, no. The money I saved wou
ld buy the fruit cocktail and a pound-and-a-half would do, because of the pastry, I’d forgotten about that. I put it back, watching the glass panel above with guilt, and took the smaller cut instead. Monica took sausages which was typical and Olga lamb cutlets which was also typical and which I knew she would serve with paper frills in a silver entrée dish.

  “I have to go,” I said, “or I’ll be late.”

  “Coffee,” Monica said. “I need some ground.”

  “Cheerio. Tell Martha we’re expecting her for bridge tomorrow.” Olga waved a plastic tray containing half a chicken.

  The time you saved in the supermarket you lost trying to get out again. There were queues at all the check-out points. I joined the shortest, three people coming in no time behind me, then I remembered the tin of fruit cocktail and decided not to bother or I’d lose my place. There must be something in the larder. The woman I stood behind had only a tin of sweet corn and a swiss roll and some steel-wool in her basket and I thought that’s good she won’t take long. We shuffled slowly up to the counter. I put a packet of Maltesers and a milk chocolate flake for Robin and Diana into my basket and a box of matches exactly as Betterfare had intended I should. I got my purse out ready as the woman ahead of me put her basket down in front of the girl who was operating the till. The plastic label on her bosom said Miss Jenkins and that she was at my service. She had ginger hair and false eyelashes and I think what was intended to be the Cleopatra look. She pressed the buttons smartly, one-and-a-penny for the swiss roll and ninepence for the steel-wool and one-and-six for the sweet corn. She had a long red finger-nail on the total button when the woman said oh no the sweet corn was one-and-fourpence-halfpenny. Miss Jenkins up-ended the tin and one-and-six was stamped indelibly in blue. The woman said on the shelf was a ticket that said one-and-fourpence-halfpenny. Miss Jenkins looked at the till, which was irrevocable, and sighed and waited. The woman waited too and I shuffled with impatience and so did the people behind beginning to get curious. The woman, sticking to her guns, said I would like to get it cleared up, flushing but only slightly. Miss Jenkins still saying nothing but looking daggers whined “Mr Weller, check-out please!” into her microphone and settled down to stare vacantly into space. I glanced across at the other queues but they were now quite long and it was pointless losing my place. I was annoyed because I still had to go the greengrocer’s and give an order. Mr Weller in a blue overall hurried across and said what’s the trouble Miss Jenkins and the woman explained quite politely about the sweet corn. Mr Weller shepherded her away to the place where she had found the offending article and we all breathed a sigh of relief. It turned out to be premature because having started the addition, but not rung up a total, Miss Jenkins was powerless to take the money for our goods no matter how much we chaffed and champed. A young man with a loaf of bread put down one-and-three on the counter and pushed his way through and Miss Jenkins looked at it doubtfully then decided to accept it putting it neatly on one side. In any case the young man had already gone and you could see she’d had enough trouble for one morning. Eventually the woman came back shepherded by Mr Weller and said nicely to Miss Jenkins that she had had the matter satisfactorily explained. The one-and-fourpence-halfpenny referred to the chilli-peppers on the shelf below. Miss Jenkins pressed the total button extracting the paper receipt with its purple figures and we all pushed merrily on.