Diana knew it was too expensive and said nothing leaving me in peace to fight it out with my conscience. With the shoe in my hand I gazed blankly at the central glass table on which were a red ballet shoe, a neat white leather boot, and a slipper with Noddy on, and told myself it was quite ridiculous to pay almost six pounds for shoes for a small child to grow out of.
The alternative was further tramping, arguments, disappointments. It was only shoes, only money. I made a mental apology to Tim for being such a bad manager. I would make it up, I told myself, chopping fresh cabbage, better anyway than frozen peas, by making interesting dishes out of nothing, not falling for a new lipstick colour. We’ll take these, I said. Diana said they’re absolutely super. I looked at my watch. There would be just time to drop Diana at the Haynes’ and get to the Porterhouse in time to meet Dobbie.
Clarice Haynes was either a very good mother or a very bad one. I could never quite decide. Penny was an only child and Clarice wouldn’t have hesitated for a moment over navy blue shoes at five pounds seventeen-and-six. The child was dressed exclusively at the White House or Fortnums, went out to dinner as often as her parents who were in the film business, and always stayed up when they entertained at home. According to Diana she had every record under the sun, a collection of dolls from every part of the world, and was allowed to watch television as much as she liked. The end result of all this was, strangely enough, that Penny Haynes was one of the sweetest children one could wish to meet. She was smiling, friendly, self-composed without appearing in the slightest precocious. Wearing a sleeveless pink and white candy-striped dress of expensive simplicity she opened the door to us and at once embraced Diana in an enormous hug.
“I’m so glad you could come. We’re going swimming straight after lunch, well not straight after because of letting it go down, and then out to tea. Hallo, Mrs Westbury, won’t you come in? Mummy’s on the telephone but she won’t be a moment.”
It was a quarter to one but I thought it rather rude to rush off without saying hallo so followed Penelope along the corridor with the Canalettos and into the white drawing-room. Clarice Haynes was saying she had to rush now darling into the white telephone. I had seen her at parents’ meetings, in winter in her full-length mink, in summer Balenciaga silk, and when we’d taken and fetched the children from parties. She was exceedingly good-looking and had the kind of face, with high cheekbones, which would look good well into old age.
“Won’t you have a drink?” she said. She was dressed in navy silk with white beads. “It’s so frightfully hot.”
“I have an appointment.” I loved the irony of meeting Dobbie and no-one knowing. “I have to go.”
She put an arm round Diana who you could see like all small girls loved Clarice because she looked and smelled divine and said, “Don’t worry about Diana. We’ll deliver her about six.”
I kissed Diana and she disappeared giggling and arm in arm with Penny into her bedroom and Clarice Haynes opened the door.
Going down in the lift I thought at last, Dobbie, and wondered why I felt so nervous.
I kept telling myself it was ‘only Dobbie’ but as soon as I entered the Porterhouse I knew it wasn’t ‘only Dobbie’ at all. It was something far less familiar that I was walking into. It was gloomy despite the bright light outside, and you could forget it was summer. Electric light and men in dark suits; a lot of men; business lunches, I supposed, men always went for steaks. The few women were smartly dressed but not like the Causerie, in a less obvious way. I wondered whether they were wives or girl friends. I looked round and couldn’t see Dobbie. It was ten past one. I suddenly panicked in case it was the wrong place or he’d changed his mind making me look foolish.
The head waiter in maroon jacket and maroon bow tie asked could he help me, bending from the waist, ear poised to receive my confidence. I said I was meeting someone and he said was it Mr Arthur Dobson and that he had just telephoned to say he was unavoidably delayed and would I be kind enough to sit at his table and have a drink.
I regained my composure and followed him to the end of the room where two fans were whirring on the wall. He pulled out a corner table, oak with red mats and gristicks in a green vase, and I slithered in and sat on the banquette and said yes I would have a sherry. He went away snapping his fingers at the wine waiter and I looked round the room to make sure there was no-one I knew. There didn’t seem to be so I took off my gloves and helped myself to a gristick to nibble and tried to relax. I assumed what I considered a very soignée air. It was meant to imply that I was in the habit of lunching à deux with men who were not my husband instead of meeting Martha or one of the girls for coffee and a sandwich or sharing Ryvita and Danish blue with Mrs Mac. I pretended first that I was in business, fashion buyer perhaps for a large store, although really I needed a black suit and executive glasses, or the tough cookie in charge of a model agency. Each time the door opened I came back to earth and looked anxiously for Dobbie and thought it was getting rather late and really was too bad and perhaps I should show my independence and not wait. The sherry was good and I sipped it slowly to make it last as the steaks and the Béarnaise floated by. When Dobbie came in it was casually, loose-limbed, one hand in his pocket and grinning and my inside churned. He moved to the table beating the waiter to it and sat next to me on the banquette and said I really am sorry Liz the car broke down in Wardour Street and I had to ring the AA and get a taxi and I hope you haven’t been here too long.
I said no I hadn’t. They brought two menus from which Dobbie chose a T-bone and I decided on chicken marengo and oxtail soup first for both of us. They took the menus away again and I looked at Dobbie and Dobbie looked at me. I felt quite shy and the panic again, then he took my hand and held it very hard and looked right into my eyes and said hallo Liz I’ve been thinking about you.
Seven
I said I’ve been thinking about you too and still holding my hand, stroking it with his thumb, he said what have you been doing with yourself? I was about to tell him about Diana and the navy blue shoes, as I would have Tim, when I thought my God no, nor about the laundry which had so thoughtlessly decided to have its annual holiday at an inconvenient moment or Mrs Mac’s Ted who was now with Frigidaire’s and going slow for some incomprehensible reason. I would have chattered away about all these things at home to the old Dobbie, but here in the Porterhouse things had changed and I tried to think of conversation in keeping with my new role. Tell me about Italy, he said. That was even worse because for the life of me all I could think of was the time when Diana was sick in the hired car going up to Fiesole and the laughs we had had trying to eat spaghetti like the natives in a Trattoria in Rome; family things which came out absurdly flat unless you had actually participated. Fortunately flashing through and rejecting the hundred and one things that had happened that were foremost in my mind, I remembered the Bargello which was a favourite too with Dobbie and we got well dug in with that and della Robbia, Andrea and Luca.
The oxtail soup came and the waiter with a flick of his wrist put our napkins across our laps then poured the soup expertly from silver cups into the plates. Dobbie was telling me now about Tunis. I wished I had been there with him.
The chicken marengo was superb. I’d noticed on the menu it cost eighteen-and-six and couldn’t help thinking that for that I could do chicken marengo for all of us at home instead of just one portion. Then I didn’t think about it but just enjoyed it listening to Dobbie. We had wine which I wasn’t used to in the middle of the day and I enjoyed that too and it made me feel deliciously drowsy and thoughts of Tim and Diana and Robin and Mrs Mac at home retreated and there was just me and Dobbie in the Porterhouse. We laughed a lot and talked of general inconsequential things and when they brought the coffee in a Cona I was amazed to discover that it was three o’clock. We were sitting very close together and I was happy. Dobbie said: “You know Liz I still feel concerned about Tim.”
I knew what he meant and it sobered me up. I stubbed out my cigare
tte.
“It’s awfully difficult to explain,” I said. “But you see this makes no difference to Tim and me.”
“It would if Tim knew about it.”
“He doesn’t.”
“How would you react if Tim behaved in the same way?”
It was a question I had asked myself. “I’d murder him. Anyway he wouldn’t.”
“How do you know?”
“I know Tim.”
“Perhaps he thinks he knows you?”
“Men are different. Open books. Women always leave some of the pages uncut.”
“I wouldn’t trade on that.”
“Tim and I are happy.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“It’s not enough. I’m thirty-six. I want to share Tim’s life, make a home for his children and yet experience something else. The most degrading part is the hypocrisy and caution. If he asks me what I did today I shall lie.”
“Suppose you are disappointed?”
“Are you crying off?”
“Look at me.”
I looked and felt myself desirable, animated by his expression.
“You get more beautiful.”
“Not beautiful.”
“Whatever you like; but more so.”
I knew it for myself. The age I suppose. I had lost the gaucheness of youth and felt within an intangible poise, I suppose you could call it ripeness. It was this I wanted to preserve.
“Forget about Tim,” I said. “I absolve you from all responsibility.”
Dobbie tapped the side of his brandy glass with a knife and asked the waiter, when he came, for the bill.
Outside it was hot. Twenty years earlier we would have stretched full length on the browning grass in the park; hired a boat perhaps, Dobbie rowing.
In the street, shaded by the awning of an antique shop, we faced each other.
“Back to the flat?”
I wanted to sit somewhere cool after the food and wine.
When I hesitated he said: “I can give you my credentials.”
I knew what he was trying to say. That I had known him a long time and that going back to his flat was not the euphemism it might appear. I was well aware that Dobbie, hadn’t he been good old Dobbie for years, could be trusted. It was Liz Westbury broken out in a new place I was not so sure about.
When we got to the car I asked Dobbie if he wanted to drive and he said no, go ahead and it was strange because with Tim I would have insisted. I had been driving for years but as soon as I felt Tim at my side even looking nonchalantly out of the window or pretending to read the newspaper every vestige of judgment was gone. I drove like a novice, with apprehension, as if the instructor was at my elbow. I knew it wasn’t going to be like that with Dobbie. He sat calmly relaxed, and it was a real calm, waiting for me to get on with it. I drove with ease, as I usually did, even through the afternoon traffic and parked, devoid of tension, outside the Georgian house where Dobbie lived. I thought suppose Tim comes by and sees the car but then why on earth should he. His office was in Queen Anne Street and it seemed terribly unlikely.
I had been up to Dobbie’s many times of course with Tim, sometimes even alone. It had been a convenient meeting place when joining Tim in town. This time it was different. I tried to imagine I was unmarried, Catherine, anything but an ageing suburbanite with two children seeking to recapture a lost youth.
The behaviour I was contemplating, that to date even with Dobbie, was I knew that of an adolescent on the threshold of a future in which anything might happen. Mine, the real one, was already circumscribed, Tim, the children, thirty-four Hazelbank, it was unlikely now that anything further, anything dynamic that was, would come to pass. The infuriating part was that now, for the first time I felt experienced, mature enough to make my mark on a world which seemed already to have passed, or at least to be passing, me by. I did not look it but I had never felt so young.
Dobbie’s flat was beautiful. At the time he moved from a block within a re-development scheme in Chelsea he had been going out with an interior decorator called Christabel who had truly done him proud. He had the top floor of the house. The two main rooms, sitting-room and bedroom, had double doors connecting them and beautiful green Wilton carpet covering the whole area. He had Georgian chairs, antique pottery figures, a serpentine-fronted Regency table; it seemed criminal that he was rarely at home to enjoy it. The rest of the accommodation consisted of guest room, with Italian urns and Georgian fire-screen, a kitchen which was the last word, which he never used, and a bathroom likewise, which he did.
I sat on the green brocade settee while Dobbie made a telephone call. He spoke to a Mr Parsons and got terribly angry in a very quiet way and said it wasn’t good enough and he must get through to Hamburg right away and ring him back. He hung up without saying goodbye. When he turned to me I felt for a moment as if I was the next item on the agenda.
“Men are lucky,” I said.
“Why?”
“They have the world at their fingertips.”
“Women don’t do so badly these days.”
“We dabble. The great things have always been done by men.”
“What about Joan of Arc?”
“Hercules, David, Napoleon, Bismarck, Lenin, Michelangelo … So many men for one Joan of Arc.”
He sat next to me on the sofa and took the cigarette out of my hand and put it in an ashtray on the coffee table and kissed me. I wasn’t prepared, thinking there’d be some sort of preamble. At first I didn’t respond, thinking of Tim and that I should be at home and what was I doing here, then I began to revolve in Space and forgot about Tim, rather pushed him to the back of my mind, and I did. After about three minutes, at least I suppose it was, I didn’t look at my watch, I came back to earth again and thought my God what have I started and began to get panic-stricken. It was all right though because just at that moment Dobbie released me and gave me my cigarette back and sat back and said now Liz, tell me what all this is in aid of.
You could hear the faint noise of the traffic below but other than that it was completely quiet and I realised suddenly how peaceful no children or Mrs Mac or telephone or the girls dropping in and that I was cut off, escaped, and felt tremendously at peace.
“Like Topsy,” I said, “it just grew.”
I suppose you’d call it a kind of restlessness and it had been coming on for a long time. I noticed it first when the children began to go to school all day; at least it started then but I don’t think I was properly aware of it until later, when they were able to come and go on their own and I no longer had to do the taking and fetching that had divided my day into small segments. There was still the odd chauffeuring to do; elocution and music and Guides on Tuesdays. But there was time on my hands. When Robin finished with his prep school and went away there would be even more. Looking back it seemed that at one point the day was never long enough; toddlers to be fed and bathed and changed and walked and nursed and cleared up after until you were so exhausted you lived only for bed or putting your feet up and the next they were out of the house and at school all day and Mrs Mac and the machines coped with most of the work and you were just left.
“I wonder if you know what it’s like,” I said. “Every day more or less the same. Tim goes out with the children in the morning, he drops them at school, the door closes behind them and I’m alone, free. In a way I’m glad to see them go. Mrs Mac comes but there are a hundred and one things to be seen to. I’m busy all day, my hands that is. I go out; nothing very exciting, I look forward to the time when they’ll be home. My family. I imagine how it will be; stimulating, exciting. It never is. Diana won’t get on with her homework, Robin’s all over the place with his great big shoes, Tim is tired. It’s always a disappointment. Tim is disappointed too, I can tell. He’s looking for something I don’t succeed in providing. Something he’s dreamed about on his way home, sitting in the traffic jams. We fail each other. The dream fades as we eat dinner making polite conversation which has
nothing to do with communication. Our days remain separate; His and Hers.
“After dinner we read, watch television, talk. I always seem to be waiting for something to happen. When we go to bed I feel let down because it hasn’t; perhaps tomorrow. Tomorrow the door slams after them and it begins again.”
“Why don’t you get a part-time job?”
“That’s what Tim says. I’ve had enough of offices. There’s nothing else I seem capable of or want to do.”
I’d worked for an advertising company before I was married and part-time until Diana was on the way. It sounded more interesting than it was. Some of the girls in the village in a similar situation, the ones who didn’t devote most afternoons to bridge for which I hadn’t much patience, took up hobbies, swimming, the violin, pastimes they had abandoned in their youth. Some of them went to evening classes. I tried that but it didn’t last long. It was called Creative Writing. I suppose I imagined myself a budding author. It took place in a damp and freezing institute with intense people who came straight from work and were too utterly dreary for words and produced the most infantile short stories and essays to which we all had to listen. My enthusiasm soon wore off. Learn Spanish or Italian, Tim said; it would at least be useful. I had always been hopeless at languages and didn’t want to go back to the effort of past participles and adjectival clauses. I had been glad enough to escape from that at school. When the actual transition came from just feeling restless to actively thinking about Dobbie I can’t remember. He seemed to have been in my mind for so long.
The Commonplace Day Page 7