Home life
Ash, no sackcloth
Alice Thomas Ellis
The telephone continues to baffle me. I came home the other day to find a message from Maureen. She had been dusting the drawing room when the lunatic thing rang and told her to tell me that my brother in Australia was returning my call and would ring again that evening. Oh good, I thought, and it took me a moment to remember that I don't have a brother — in Australia or anywhere else. I am an only child, although my mother occasionally appears to forget this too. Sometimes when I ring her I say, 'Hullo Mummy,' and she says, 'Is that you darling?' Being so solitary I was enchanted to discover the other day that my cousin Jeffrey (no relation, if you follow me — I wondered for a while whether it was my fate to dote on men called Jeffrey, then I remembered Mrs Thatcher's one) and I are exactly alike — well not exactly. You could tell us apart, but he and I are very similar. For one thing he smokes and drinks, and when told by people shaking their heads mournfully that he will not reach a ripe old age he says he doesn't give a toot. My `I suppose it's the only place left for them.' sentiments entirely. I often think, when it's raining and the telephone doesn't stop ringing, that if the Grim Reaper were to lean over the garden wall beckoning with a bony digit I would slip my tiny hand trustfully in his and go off with him without a backward glance. In passing — I was told recently by an economist, who presumably has a good grasp of numbers, that there are now more people alive than there are dead; that the great majority is now the minority. Can this be true? How does he know? How many angels can dance on the point of a pin?
But to return to my cousin Jeffrey. He loves cooking. He spends hours in the kitchen smoking and drinking and making elaborate Chinese meals for his wife and children and then he doesn't eat any of it himself. I do that too. I like everyone to sit down at the table out of my way while I hover about in the back kitchen with the fags. Guests, of course, find this rather disconcerting and I can see why. It is not reassuring to reflect that the patron doesn't mange ici, but I promise everyone the food is perfectly wholesome and there isn't even any fag ash in it because us confirmed smokers are adept at holding the left, fag-bearing hand well out of the way. My cousin smokes in the bath and can wash his hair with one hand, and I have developed a method of flicking the ash down my sleeve when I find myself marooned in the middle of a room surrounded by people with the ashtray miles out of reach on a corner table. The butt presents a problem, though; now so many people are straining after Health a lot of them leave their drinks half drunk, and a glass with a bit of white wine in it offers a safe means of disposal and is less offensive to the host than burn holes in the Axminster, I think. I was once asked to a party by some Americans who wrote on the invitation, "This is a non- smoking household.' I didn't bother to reply. Could they have imagined that I would prefer to be with them rather than sitting in my kitchen, smoking?
I find some people's thought processes awfully difficult to follow. Not least those of my friend the analyst who has just telephoned me because he wanted some- body to shout at. He was mad with three other people, but they were all out; so he went prowling round to find a legitimate cause of complaint and was grimly delight- ed to discover what he describes as a burn hole in a plastic thing in his garden. He accused me of causing it by dropping a lighted cigarette-end off his flat roof, and when I indignantly denied it he said I was only making it worse by telling lies. If he will go out on to his flat roof he will find, in the wall flanking it, a hole in the pointing; and if he will look in this hole he will find that I have stuffed all the fag-ends in there.
I love most of my friends and some of my relations but the ones I love best are visible in the dark because they have a glowing fag in their face.
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