I was peacefully potting up geraniums the other day when I found myself needing more broken crocks for drainage purposes. Seizing a cracked flowerpot I rushed outside and dashed it to the ground.
I suddenly became aware that my husband and two other men were watching me guardedly.
‘Need more crocks,’ I jabbered, ‘for pots, you see.’
It didn’t help the situation. They all moved off down the garden talking loudly about chicken-wire.
One of these men, a handsome, inscrutable type, has dropped in on three occasions since then to discuss community matters. The discussions have all been conducted in the friendliest possible way but I am left with an uneasy feeling that he sees me as some kind of nut. The first time he knocked at our door I was under the dining-room table in mortal coil with the vacuum cleaner. The second visit found me swathed in my muu-muu and reading a seed catalogue out loud, quite violently, to my husband. (One has to stress things rather to husbands, to capture even minimal attention sometimes.) During his third visit I just happened to be running from room to room trying to trace a mysterious clicking noise.
‘Can’t you hear it?’ I puffed, as I sped past him. He is a polite man. He turned and studied our bookcase in a fairly rapt way. At that moment the clicking stopped and it didn’t seem worth going into lengthy explanations.
There are mornings when I awake cool and refreshed – could there be more oxygen around on those mornings? These are the times when I not only do the housework in my false eyelashes but I actually get them on straight. Even my dusters seem cleaner and more golden on these mornings. (You should see them on my off-days.)
‘If only …’ I think, as I toss crisp, hardly worn things into the washing-machine … ‘if only people would drop in today!’ But of course, as we all know to our cost, they never do.
No. They come on onion-pickling day when my face is all runny. Or when I am reluctantly trying out those really terrible slippers someone sent for my birthday.
I wouldn’t mind so much if they sometimes caught me at a disadvantage. Even quite shining housewives have been known to cry, ‘My God, it’s them already!’ as we stand, like bollards, on the other sides of their front doors.
But it does seem hard that, for me, there are people who always arrive when our place looks like The House of Usher. For that matter there is a brother-in-law who comes to see us sometimes and each time he drops in we are having steak and kidney pie for dinner. We don’t have it very often and he comes only rarely, but the two events invariably coincide.
‘I like this one even better than the last one, he says with commendable tact, but I get the impression that he feels a bit sorry for my husband.
The other day some friends said to me: ‘Come on, climb into your mac and come into town with us.’
It must have been a good day for baby-minders because the next thing I knew, I was sitting, all unencumbered, on the 10.15 to Paddington.
I don’t know about you, but in our house there is usually a great deal of dashing to and fro with hair-rollers and shoe-brushes and newly ironed blouses the night before A Day Out.
On this particular morning, pleased as I was to be making unexpected whoopee, I was sadly aware that it was one of my wrinkled, frizzy days.
We must pause here and cast our thoughts back to the distant past when I used to think it was fun to sit on newspapers in the gallery of the Albert Hall at Prom time. Not only was I fairly desperate about Beethoven, but there was this smouldering boy-friend – a sort of Alan Badel at his most Proud and Prejudiced. (Oh, the pinched nostrils. Oh, the heavy-lidded eyes.)
We now return to the wispy-haired, London-bound present, because this was the day I bumped into the same boy-friend (who looked even better than I remembered him). And oh, my dears, he stared thoughtfully over his shoulder, shook his head sadly and walked away.
I told someone about this and she had a similar, sad story to tell. Her ‘old-smoulderer’ turned up one day and she invited him in. Just as they sat down together a great blob of marmalade slid down from her hair and landed in his coffee cup.
I would like to think that perhaps, just once, even Helen of Troy stepped backwards into a bucket of paste. Or that Don Juan leapt passionately over a balcony and landed in something nasty.
It would only be fair.