Parlour Games Read online

  In Victorian times, indeed, when this very house was built, there was no such thing as puberty. One day, if female, you were a little girl – tea in the nursery and trotted out for parental appraisal just before bedtime – and then, suddenly, the next your hair was put up, your skirts were let down and bingo (or should it be mah-jongg?) you were a young lady. Similarly nowadays in Bedford Park there is no such thing as middle age. You are still a young woman shopping in trendy shops until suddenly, one day, you have a fall in Chelsea Girl and need a hip operation. Youth to old age in one move.

  The few women of Celia’s acquaintance who do not fit into this pattern are usually of the green wellie brigade and go hacking off to their country cottages at weekends. On the whole Celia tends to be on nodding terms only with them, finding their manners and their minds too rigid for her taste. She prefers the more free and easy variety of Bedford Park wife, such as her best neighbourhood friend Hazel.

  Celia met Hazel at somebody’s drinks party ten years ago. They were both just pregnant and sat side by side on a settee with a peanut-sized progeny in their respective wombs and glasses of orange juice in their hands. Celia cast a covert look at Hazel and saw a large-boned, fair-haired woman with the fresh complexion often associated with well-bred girls from the Home Counties. The sort of woman whom Celia would normally have avoided. But circumstances change attitudes. Celia also recognised, from the slightly drooping mouth and watery eyes, that this was someone who, like herself, was not feeling too good. So she spoke. And so bound up in her newly discovered state of fertilisation was she that her first words were, ‘Hallo, I’m pregnant,’ instead of, ‘Hallo, I’m Celia.’

  This had caused the two of them much queasy laughter, the amusement continuing when they discovered that their accouchements were to be within days of each other.

  ‘That means,’ Celia had said, ‘that we were both At It somewhere in Bedford Park at about the same time ...’

  ‘I don’t think I shall ever feel like doing it again ...’ Hazel said. ‘... Do you?’

  Their close friendship, forged and bonded by the uncharted waters of new experience, has stayed supreme. And though others have joined the coterie since, there is no one quite as close to Celia and Hazel as they are to each other. From each other these two have no secrets. They talk about their anxieties regarding their children, they discuss their bodies freely, and in exceptional circumstances they will speak about the emotional hummocks that occur between man and wife in any Bedford Park family. Such exchanges are very therapeutic and help maintain the balance nicely. On the whole they do not talk about their lives Before Children, which are less secrets than irrelevancies and another country to them now. They very seldom talk about BC – for it has little relevancy to their daily lives. Occasionally there is a fusion of the past and the present but it is seldom intimate. Pre-Bedford Park life is an island somewhere offshore. Celia and her neighbours are all settled on the mainland which is a far more sedate community.

  But tonight, because it is Celia’s very special fortieth-birthday dinner, she has decided to mix it a little. She has invited six guests in all, a small number by Bedford Park standards. Usually Celia is a gregarious creature but on this most intimate and personal of shibboleths she has decided to spend it simply, with those three couples who know her best and who straddle the old and the new of her life. This, then, is what Celia prepares for. A celebration of her past and her present. Forty years down and another forty to go. She has no role to play tonight, she has merely to be herself. She can, metaphorically, put her feet up. She can relax. She has to prove nothing to these guests who all know her so well. Even – and perish the thought – the food can go wrong and it will not matter. She is safe in the bosom of their knowing her, rather as Cromwell would have liked it, with warts and all. Not that there are many warts on this cheerful, untroubled woman, but the few there are need not be disguised. It is a very happy thought.

  Now the air is redolent of gently steaming fish. The kitchen suddenly, miraculously, becomes silent as both machines in perfect accord finish their cycles. Celia turns towards the eggs and the beater and the good-quality Lucca oil (first pressing, cold) and begins. She is in a state close to rapture for not only is she cooking (which she loves) but the Golden Oldie slot on Radio One is playing Hits from a year familiar to her youth. She would not tell Adrian but sometimes she wishes he would play a few of these as well as current bands. Probably, she thinks, the other wives who use his salon wish the same – but like Celia they never say anything either. Adrian can make you feel very old if you speak out of line. It is a sign of a splendidly misspent youth that she knows all the words to the songs: Beatles, Stones, Manfred Mann – how wonderful it was to be alive then.

  She lets the oil trickle into the bowl of yolks slowly, singing away as she does so. And how good it is to be alive now. She can honestly say that she is perfectly happy and content with the way her life is moving on. She will be able to say this tonight, wholeheartedly and unashamedly. She will be able to say to her guests that in her own way, and not to make too much of it, she has been blessed in the past forty years, and that she expects to be blessed just the same in the next.

  As she meticulously completes the beating process, unhurriedly – for none but a careless cook would rush mayonnaise – Celia savours a warm rush of pleasure and an incontrovertible sense of being at one with humanity. She thinks about her guests. Her elder sister Isabel, naturally, with her husband Dave. Her oldest friend from schooldays, Susannah, and her husband Tom. And, of course, Hazel and John. What a very good mixture that will be. Oh yes, oh yes. Life is good. Even Mrs Green, stooping and sniffing about her business of emptying first the washing machine and then the dishwasher, cannot deflate the warm bubble of happiness that surrounds Celia as she makes her preparations and thinks her pleasing thoughts. No, not even Mrs Green can dispel all that.

  ‘A beautiful drying day,’ says Celia.

  Mrs Green pulls her porridge-coloured cardigan around her thin shoulders as comment, and goes out into the garden.

  It is good that it is a beautiful drying day, since Celia does not want washing hanging around tonight. She has learned in her forty years (nearly, nearly) to bless the little joys as well as the big ones in her life. To seek for silver linings. For out of small things, big things grow. Do they not?

  She begins the final sensual trickling of best-quality Lucca into the bowl of yolks.

  Mrs Green comes in.

  ‘Hazel is having the children for tea today, Mrs Green. Isn’t that nice of her?’

  ‘Indeed.’ The lady sniffs. ‘You’d have thought she’d have enough to do looking after her own.’

  ‘That’s just what I said,’ says Celia happily.

  Mrs Green sniffs again, remembering that she had two children and none of this in and out of each other’s houses nonsense. She forgets that her mother lived in the same street. She begins to remove what seems to her an outrageous amount of cutlery from the machine.

  ‘Do you want this in the dining room?’ she asks grimly.

  ‘No thanks. You can put it away. We’ll be using the posh stuff tonight.’ Reluctantly Celia lets the warm bubble disperse. Mrs Green’s sniffing has reached orchestral proportions. ‘Have you got a cold?’

  ‘No,’ says the lady, dropping each piece into its appropriate slot in the cutlery drawer, counting it under her breath, wishing as she does so that she had found some intimate appliance upstairs. Nobody should have this much cutlery.

  Percussion over and drawer closed as noisily as its well-made John Lewis runners will permit, Mrs Green says, ‘I’ll put the kettle on, shall I?’

  Celia indicates the mayonnaise which is nearly done, and says, as usual, ‘No, no. You go and sit down. I’ll do that.’ She moves the dish of albumen out of the way and as she does so she smirks, for the thought has come to her, out of nowhere really, that a bowl of raw egg-white looks rather like a giant puddle of semen. Her cleaner would have a fit if she could kn
ow the thought, she thinks. Quite right. Mrs Green would love to squirrel away that dirty notion. She has counted over fifty pieces of cutlery. No wonder we lost our powers of ESP at around the same time we lost the use of our appendix or Celia would be much disturbed by her cleaner’s thoughts. Nature is a sensible matron – sometimes.

  ‘Good old Hazel,’ she says out loud. ‘It really is the best of birthday presents: a whole day to myself. Not that I don’t love my children, Mrs Green – but it’s so nice to be free of them once in a while and to do something purely for me ...’

  Sniff, sniff.

  Children – ah yes. In Bedford Park there are quite a lot of these. It is a wonderful area for bringing up a family. There are plenty of parks and open spaces in which they can mix with their peers. The primary schools are excellent as befits the institutions of a Conservation Area: people used to fighting for their environment make a strong lobby in other matters. Here the teachers are keen, the children motivated and bright (a few have ‘learning problems’, but are fortunately never designated ‘thick’). The premises are well-kept and any short-fall in resources is soon made up by the tireless fundraising of the Parents’ Association. Indeed, it has done this so well over the years that the local authority relies on it now and relevant governmental departments have been heard to say that if this little corner of London can do it for their schools why cannot other little corners like Tooting and Tower Hamlets? ‘Well, well, nothing like that ever happens here ...’ may be extended to the national problems of state education. In Bedford Park only a snob would send their child to a private primary school: in Bedford Park the state system is a success and Celia’s and Hazel’s children use it. Well – while they are younger, anyway ...

  Henry is nine, Rebecca is six. These are Celia’s. Hazel has two, also, of the same age but of opposing sexes. Verity and Caspar. On the whole they are good children except that Rebecca, being bright (rather than difficult) tends not to sleep much at night – and Hazel’s Caspar still fouls his pants. They both agree that their respective children will grow out of these traits – after all, Rebecca is a sensible child, and as for Caspar, well, no one has yet met a racing driver who cannot control his bowels and that is what Caspar wants to be. He may well achieve this for he already walks upon opportunity’s carpet as a Bedford Park boy.

  Unfortunately, this cohesive similarity in their children will soon be at an end. For while the primary schools are excellent, the state secondary education simply will not do. And since the two women have not matched up the sexes of their offspring (or rather, as they ruefully riposte, their husbands did not for it is, of course, the male who determines gender) these happy days of swapping around and sharing school runs must terminate. Older children are educated privately and the girls are separated from the boys. Celia’s Henry will begin this expensive business next year. This has not been an easy decision for her. Indeed, in truth, it was not her decision at all for it was taken by her husband, Alex, to whom it was scarcely a matter for conjecture. It was the natural way. If Celia had the faintest sense of conscience, the residue, perhaps, from her Labour Party days, Alex had none. To him it was merely the way of things and his decision as both father and husband. Private secondary education is quite normal in Bedford Park and Celia accepts this. On the whole she tends to accept most of the local tenets and, largely, agrees more and more with Alex’s point of view. As her husband says, if they can afford it why shouldn’t they have it?

  Well, quite.

  Ah, yes – husbands. In this house in Bedford Park in which Celia is even now listening for the kettle to boil, there dwells one of these. Alex. Well, just at this particular moment, of course, he does not dwell there because he is somewhere else doing his job. In fact, what with coming back at eight or eight-thirty, often being away for two nights in the week and accounting for seven hours’ sleep a night, Alex spends only about sixty waking hours in his home in each seven days. Not surprising then that he and Celia have a good marriage. On the whole you are either striving to maintain a good one, endeavouring to reclaim a bad one, or going for gold, hereabouts. Marriage is very much In and sanctified. And husbands tend to be rational and reasonable, as Alex is.

  He is a nice man. He has thinning, sandy-coloured hair, pale-blue eyes, a tall, spare body with a little paunch which, at forty-three, is not surprising. He is a business lawyer and has done very well out of the Big Bang. He works hard and enjoys his job and votes Liberal as he always did. This sets him apart from many of his colleagues but still, he doesn’t mind, he is brilliant enough to carry the eccentricity – rather enjoys it – and anyway, that is where his social conscience lies. He may live like a Tory, he says, but that does not mean he has to vote like one. Both he and Celia agree that they are lucky to have what they have and that it is not, necessarily, the fault of the deprived that they are deprived. The diplomacy of his job spills over into his private life. Alex appears to get on well with everyone – it is only to his wife that he speaks the truth. This makes life much easier for Celia and Hazel since he and John rub along together very well. John is a designer, partner in a firm of building developers, and a hail-fellow-well-met jolly type; Alex is more introverted but on the common ground of their wives’ relationship they do well enough. It would be awful, the women agree, if they did not. Alex does respect John’s skills (applied art is good art) and his professionalism. This latter counts for much. Professionalism makes the world run smoothly, emotionalism merely clogs the wheels.

  When Celia and Alex were planning the various restructurings of their home (the few allowed under the conservationist’s charter) very wisely they did not consult John professionally. The heads that rolled afterwards in the usual disappointed aftermath of design and building did not include John’s. He could only commiserate with them when the second bathroom’s plumbing proved faulty and the handmade windows for the back extension were half an inch out all round and the slope on the patio at the back caused a small flood indoors during the first thunderstorm after completion.

  Alex, being a professional man, understands other professional men. He would not dream of asking John casually about anything to do with the design of his house, just as John would never dream of asking Alex anything about business law in a casual manner. It would be like asking the butcher for a free sausage or requesting an extra dollop of ice cream without paying for it. In less salubrious neighbourhoods this is practised – it is known as the black economy – but here it is certainly not embraced by Alex or John or their likes. They have no need of it.

  Sometimes Celia gets a bit cross with Alex over this. Once, when a friend of hers wanted to know what the difference between employment and consultancy meant in broad terms (she had just been offered the latter by a publisher and as her children were older than Celia’s she thought she might be able to fit such work in), Celia had asked Alex on her behalf. ‘It would only take two sentences,’ Celia said lightly to her husband. But no. Two sentences, one free sausage. It is all the same. This caused, however, no friction with the friend who was married to an osteopath. After all, she had said, her husband never did soft-tissue on a Bedford Park jogger for nothing and she understood Alex’s point of view. The friend went on to take up the consultancy work anyway which paid for the part-time nanny, weekends away, children’s music lessons and better quality soft furnishings, so she was quite happy.

  And Celia’s embarrassment over Alex soon faded into no more than a fleeting envy for her friend’s new activity. But she counselled herself that there were years and years ahead before the children would be old enough for her to find time on her hands. She need not envy the little extras that the money bought, since she and Alex were quite comfortable. She vaguely envied her friend’s independent earning capacity and rather hated her, briefly, when she came round all flushed for a cup of tea and flapping a cheque for three hundred and fifty pounds made out to her and her alone – but that was all. And that soon died in Celia when she thought what she could do, given the curr
ent circumstances, which was very little. For she had no intention of going back to being a high-titled, low-esteemed dogsbody in a Bond Street art gallery, which was what she had done before the marriage and the children. Try making that seem important, she had said grimly to the mincing attachment of her Mouli as soon after this she made the children’s shepherd’s pie, when you’ve negotiated the minefield of marriage, the rearing of offspring, and the total coordination of people’s lives. Getting the year of a painting on a catalogue wrong would be a gnat bite after that.

  But still, on sullen February mornings, Celia has been known to feel herself approaching the black pit of uselessness, which is generally wiped away by organising lunch for five under-threes and their mothers. Coordinating something like that soon makes you feel a power house again. Besides, on days like today Celia can be very easily put off the worry of the Future. Her friend doing the consultancy work might be earning, but she could never stand in her kitchen on her fortieth birthday, as Celia now does, and plan a whole day of cutting radishes prettily into roses, making mayonnaise or crushing these delectable raspberries. She has earned her right to these homebound enjoyments for she is a good mother and a faithful, supportive wife. It would be puritanical sour grapes to suggest anything else.

  Alex’s father died over twenty years ago and his mother lives down on the South Coast in a distinguished little development of bungalows where she plays bridge, gardens fussily, and boasts about her grandchildren. When they married, Celia and Alex inherited all the furniture that had been put in store after the bungalow move and so their house is a comfortable mixture of good-quality Edwardian furniture and their own purchases from Heals, Peter Jones and the like. The dining room, dim and shaded, contains an ornately carved chiffonier and a ponderously solid mahogany table with matching chairs upholstered in a Regency stripe. If Celia once rebelled about this inheritance she does so no longer – rather like the sun-consuming conifer she has grown used to it – and, in truth, she rather likes the old-fashioned stuff nowadays. She did manage to lose the postwar G-plan items; no amount of goodwill could make her live with those. In the large living area at the back of the house and off which the kitchen leads, there is more of a jumble: a buffeted pair of Edwardian chaise-longues; another even bigger heavy carved table whose surface shows a history of children painting, hot coffee cups and Ribena; and a long hide covered pre-war Heals settee, much scuffed. To these they have added their collection of Tate Gallery prints – Hockney, Jim Dine, Allen Jones – and some contemporary teak and pine cabinets. Celia likes the effect of such a mixture and feels that her home has a bit more style about it than those of some of her more interior-design-conscious friends. Mrs Green, on the other hand, cannot understand why these people, who will spend a fortune on electrical items and second bathrooms, will not bother to get in some nice new furniture. In Mrs Green’s opinion that hide settee is ready for the dump, and she no longer bothers to polish the table top. It is this kind of attitude which Mrs Green cannot make head nor tail of. Two sets of cutlery and a scuffed old settee: it doesn’t make sense.