Low Life
A bowl of cherries
Jeffrey Bernard
The return of a sort of domesticity after ten years is turning out to be quite good therapy. Pottering about in the kitchen this morning, clearing and washing up after the Easter weekend and making some soup, I experienced an oblivion that seemed to be drug-induced. It was rather pleasant down there, on my hands and knees, washing the kitchen floor and the effect of the fumes and vapours given off by Flash and Jiff were something that Aldous Huxley and Truman Capote never dreamed of.
You could have amputated one of my legs and I would have been none the wiser. I was in a trance. I think I now know why all the charwomen in my life have always looked so blank. Housework could become a substitute for alcohol for those who wish to avoid the pain of thinking. But it could become addictive and I fear jumping out of bed at 3 a.m. tomorrow to hoover the sitting room carpet. Life now, though, is not an entirely semi-comatose stroll through the day. Between the housework and watering the jasmine and the tarragon the sleepy hours are full of hiccups and punctuation marks. Last night, for example, I met a neighbour, a deaf, German woman who lent me a corkscrew, and this morning I stepped across the hallway to return it to her. Then a man arrived to mend the cooker and after he had gone, I sat down with a vodka, freshly squeezed orange juice and ice to count my blessings. I sat there looking at the palms of my hands. There are now millions of lines on them, the result of the devastating effects of washing-up liquid, and I idly wondered what a palmist would make of me now. They look like one hell of a puzzle to me but, whatever the future may hold, I am off on an adventure tomorrow.
I am going to John Lewis to buy some net curtains and a curtain rail plus some bleach. At one time — and it's odd, this I would have been sitting in the Groucho Club with my face buried in The Sporting Life, studying the cards for the Craven meeting at Newmarket, but now all I want to experience is being in a big shop surrounded by housewives in a likewise trance.
Just before Easter I was in a big store to buy a mop and bucket and inexplicably found myself in the lingerie department. That must have been Memory Lane play- ing cruel tricks with me. And now the aroma of the chicken and saffron soup is beckoning me back to the kitchen. But first I must dispose of an offending toast crumb I have just spotted on the table and then I shall have to wax it, I suppose.
How strange to think that at this very moment various slobs in the Coach and Horses are flicking cigarette ash on what passes for the carpet and leaning their elbows in the puddles of beer on the counter. I couldn't live like that. Those are the sort of people who would sneer if they knew I had recently bought an apron.
Normally, at this time of day, I would be thinking about sex, but now my main concern is to make a cup of tea and nibble a plain chocolate-coated digestive biscuit, not allowed by the doctor.
I am not yet a complete fuddy duddy. I may no longer wallow, shivering with self-pity beneath a marmalade and cigarette-ash encrusted duvet in a Covent Garden attic, but I have not lost my sense of fun. I may even nibble two of those biscuits and then I shall take a bus, not taxi, up the road to Marks and Spencer to buy an avocado pear and some smoked salmon for lunch. Pasta in Soho? Don't make me sick.
After lunch I may watch the racing from Newmarket on television with a sort of amused detachment but I will thank my lucky stars that there is a madeira cake for tea and a candle-lit dinner for two tonight, with no danger of my falling asleep before they bring the bill. Until now I have always maintained that life was a bowl of shit and not cherries. How very wrong I was.
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