I expect we have all experienced that moment of truth when guests arrive and exclaim ‘What a pretty room!’ and we all look up and everybody’s eyes focus on the gigantic cobweb hanging like a hawser from the light fitting.
Well, no one actually says our living-room is pretty, but kind visitors do sometimes murmur a word or two about the proportions before backing into the kitchen because it’s cosy out there – ie, too dark to notice things like cobwebs. (On thundery, navy-blue days we have a job to find the cooker.) Sometime in the future, we tell ourselves, we are going to build a great big sun-drenched extension to the kitchen like everybody else does. Meanwhile, this year, it is the living-room’s turn for an overhaul.
I wonder why it is that one can find quite fabulous ideas in magazines and in places like the Design Centre, but the moment one tries to pass this information on to one’s builder he nudges his right-hand man (the one with the woolly bobble hat and the trowel) and wheezes: ‘She’s orf again!’ Silently they both convulse themselves before returning unswervingly to their original dabbing and stippling.
Friends and relations, too, can soon fill one’s home with well-meaning disasters particularly in those vulnerable days of early married life.
‘What this room needs,’ they say, as we step back, paint-brush in hand, to admire the play of light and shade on our simple white walls, ‘is a joke done in poker-work on a slab of bark, a three-legged gilt table lamp with matching smoker’s stand and/or a fire screen depicting a very bright and beautiful view of somewhere like Lake Como.’ ‘We’d really rather have a few simple catkins in an earthenware pitcher,’ we protest weakly.
‘Oh, you and your silly pride,’ they say briskly. ‘Just because you can’t afford good stuff yet there’s no need to pretend you like all this bareness.’ And they go on carting in rexine-covered armchairs shaped like Odeon cinemas.
So now, at long last, after several tactful years, I intend being ruthless. Anything with splayed legs will go – except, of course, very young and very old visitors who can’t help walking like that. The drunken floor standard will be replaced, perhaps by a hanging Tiffany lamp. There must at last be enough seating. (It is hard to do one’s duty as a hostess when one is scrunched up in a corner on a desperately enlisted doll’s stool.) Almost everything else will be arranged neatly on one wall with the aid of Tebrax.
Well, that is the theory anyway.
‘The old carpet will have to be burned,’ I say firmly. It really is so dreadful that our late dog used to come back indoors to spend pennies on it, doubtless on the assumption that it was better not to foul up the clean outdoors when one smelly stain more or less wouldn’t matter in the living-room.
The history of our carpet can best be summed up by snatches of family conversation, thus …
‘Photographic fix does fade out eventually – I think.’
‘Who’s for a cup of tea – whoops – who left that down there?’
‘Well, I didn’t know that noise meant he was going to be sick!’
‘Look everybody, I made some soup – oh Lor, I’d better make some more.’
‘Mummy, Daniel’s rolling his toffee apple across the floor.’
Every now and then I say I really must have a new, properly fitted carpet. Whereupon my husband looks hunted and starts talking about moving. He is cunning about it. ‘We might just get it down and then move to a much bigger house where it wouldn’t fit,’ he says.
Dazzled at the prospect of spacious living, I agree to make do a bit longer but I’m beginning to realize I am being conned. So, this very day, the old carpet is consigned to incineration and I rush out for lots of fresh white paint.
‘The aim is simplicity,’ I tell the family as I cart away loads of things people pinned up or put down ‘temporarily’ the year before last.
I suddenly realize that there is no need for me to live one more day with a leaking coal bucket and a bald hearth brush. (Picture for a moment the exquisite torture I have suffered these past several winters spraying coal dust underfoot with the former and vainly trying to clean it up with the latter.)
At last the walls are newly white, the storage shelves are up and the floor is a temporary compromise of quite pleasant rush matting.
‘We will have a bold splash of colour over there,’ I am thinking, as the first visitor arrives bearing gifts …
I suppose eventually everything comes back into fashion, but just at this moment I’d really rather have a dash of Conran in my living-room than a pair of plaster poodles balancing fringed plastic lampshades on their heads. What do other people do, in similar situations, I wonder?