Not long ago, my husband took off on a five-day ‘business’ trip which was, in fact, more of a jaunt than anything else but, instead of being cheesed off (to rescue another quaint expression) my heart leapt! Five evenings when I don’t have to think ‘What are we going to have for supper?’ and listen to stories about President Trump, who I would prefer to forget.

But, before ‘Me Time’ could begin there was a bit to do, for my husband – who taught himself French by reading Rousseau and reads Finnegans Wake for fun – does not pay much attention to things around the house; a small price to pay for the time-honoured privilege of the shtetl wife: to look after the needs of a male person who lives not in the everyday world but in the world of thought.

But the tidying didn’t take long and now three hours of uninterrupted reading in which my dislike of T.S. Eliot reached new heights, as I entered further and further into the sad and hectic life of his ‘mad’ wife who, at this juncture is – along with the poet – the plaything of the demonic Bertie: not the nice king of my girlhood, but Bertrand Russell whose History of Philosophy accompanied me through my teenage years, when I still had aspirations, but still sits on the shelf unread.

T.S. Eliot

Now, a brief visit from an old friend where we let our soup get cold as we exchange news about the wretched state of our feet, the efficacy of our various physios and our NHS insoles.

Then things began to go wrong. Just as I had put on a CD and was settling down for my nap, a phone call to report that the front door of my tenants’ flat (see post ON BEING A LANDLORD) was open. The kindly neighbour who had observed this did not know what to do. If she shut it, would she be locking my nice young tenants out? If she didn’t . . . left unsaid was what she might find if she went inside!

So, over to the flat where, gingerly – for I too have read my share of murder mysteries – I opened every door to find neither bodies nor signs of a forced entry. Clearly, one or other of them had left in a hurry and failed to lock up behind them.

Back home and about to fall asleep to Schumann’s Liederkreis when the doorbell rang and there was the electrician, come to do a few small and non-urgent jobs before lingering to chat. Do I know anything about Neil Sedaka? No I don’t. What about Bessie Smith? Yes, I do. By the time we had run through a gamut of mostly unfamiliar names (for he had mistaken the nature of my cassette collection) it was time to put on my supper.

I never got back to Eliot and his unfortunate wife* but, with the kettle on for my hot-water bottle and the Evening Pill Box – lovingly curated by my absent husband – at the ready, I did manage to tap out a testimonial for one of my long-ago authors** who, at seventy, is starting a new career as a hired-hand memoirist, to support her true calling as a brilliant but neglected writer of popular fiction.

So the day wasn’t wasted. But it wasn’t quiet either.

 

 

* Painted Shadow: A Life of Vivienne Eliot by Carole Seymour Smith

** Laurie Devine whose description of the ‘cutting ceremony’ which occurs early in Nile, the first of her epic novels, is as devastating and – as we know from the vivid testimony of Nawal El Saadawi – as topical as it ever was.