Breakfast! Bon appétit! If you can.
The manner of the breakfast declares the aspiration of the family. Some breakfast standing, some sitting, some united in silence, some fragmented in noisiness and some, as in a television commercial, seeming to have all the time and money and goodwill in the world; and some in gloomy isolation. It is the meal at which we betray ourselves, being still more our sleeping than our waking selves.
Picture now the doctor’s household this Monday morning, breakfasting according to ritual in the large back kitchen. Philip, the father, bathed, shaved, dressed, apparently benign, eats bacon and eggs delicately prepared by Margot, reads the Guardian she has placed beside his plate, and ignores the other members of his family as best he can. At eight forty-five his receptionist Lilac will arrive, and open his mail, and prepare his appointment cards. At nine the doctor will rise, put down his paper, peck his wife, nod to his children and go through to the surgery to attend to the needs of the world. Lettice and Laurence sit opposite each other. Lettice is thirteen, neat, pretty, and precise, with her mother’s build and round, regular face, but without her mother’s overwhelming amiability. If the mother were unexpectedly to bare a breast, it would surely be in the interests of some cosmic medical examination. If the daughter did so, who would doubt her erotic intent? Laurence is a dark and looming boy of fourteen, with a bloodless, troubled complexion and a bony body, as if his father’s hands had at last found expression in a whole person. There is little other resemblance between them.
Listen now to their outer voices, their conversations, their riddles, comprehended only by themselves, the secret society that composes the family.
1 LETTICE: Dad, can I have the middle of the paper?
2 DAD: What for?
3 LETTICE: To read.
4 DAD: You are a nuisance.
5 LAURENCE: Mum, I haven’t got a fork.
6 MARGOT: Sorry, dear. I’ll get one … But why do you need a fork, if you’re only eating cereal?
7 LAURENCE: Sorry. So I am.
8 LETTICE: Why don’t we ever have unsweetened cereal?
9 MARGOT: Because no one eats it.
10 LETTICE: I do. The sweetened is fattening, anyway, and not worth the extra money. It said so in Which. I think we should have unsweetened and add our own sugar.
11 LAURENCE: Lettice, you are not the centre of the universe.
12 LETTICE: I know that. The sun is.
13 LAURENCE: You are wrong. The sun is a star of average size which is itself revolving, with thousands of millions of other stars, in one galaxy among millions in a universe that might well be boundless. If you travelled at the speed of light – 186,300 miles a second, that is – it would take 6,000 million years – about 20,000 times the total period that life has existed on earth, to travel only to the limits of what we can observe from earth with our very limited technology.
14 LETTICE: So what?
15 LAURENCE: So nothing matters.
And Laurence helps himself to the last of the honey-coated wheat puffs, the creamy top of the milk, and adds the last scrape of the marmalade in the jar for good measure.
These domestic riddles can be thus translated:
1 LETTICE: Dad, take notice of me and my changing needs.
2 DAD: (cautious) What kind of need?
3 LETTICE: Don’t worry. Merely intellectual. All the same, I am growing up.
4 DAD: Oh dear. More change.
5 LAURENCE: Father is taking notice of Lettice again. Mother, will you please take some notice of me? My needs are not being properly met.
6 MARGOT: Perhaps I have been rather remiss. On the other hand, I don’t actually want to have to get to my feet on your behalf. Do you insist, my dear? We have a good relationship, you and I.
7 LAURENCE: Quite. It’s the thought that counts. Thank you.
8 LETTICE: Mother, father cares for me but I’m not so sure about you.
9 MARGOT: I have so very many people to look after.
10 LETTICE: I knew it. You want me to be plain and ugly and fat; and what’s more I’m a better housekeeper than you, so there.
11 LAURENCE: Don’t be rude to my mother, just because she’s yours as well. There are more important people in the world than you.
12 LETTICE: Father is important. You’re not.
13 LAURENCE: Father is not as important as you think. Enough of all this emotional nonsense, anyway. Facts are interesting, important, reassuring, and what’s more, I know more of them than father, for all his air of maturity.
14 LETTICE: Who cares about facts? They’re meaningless.
15 LAURENCE: All right then. We’ll all go on as we have before, sparring for position over the breakfast table. God give me strength.
The day has begun.
Breakfast time! Bon appétit! If you can manage it.
Jarvis and Lily can. They breakfast in companionable silence. At ten Jarvis will go to his office. He wears a Chairman-Mao blue jacket, bought for him by Lily from an expensive shop. Jarvis would prefer to wear a shirt, tie and jacket, but Lily plans otherwise; and she is, he acknowledges, quite right to do so. Those now leapfrogging over his talented head towards senior partnerships wear jeans, beards, and show their navels on hot days.
At ten to ten, Jarvis puts down The Times and smiles at his wife. Jonathon, wiped and cleaned, has already been set in his playpen to play with his educational toys; which, obligingly enough, he seems prepared to do: posting bright plastic shapes into a plastic letter box with supercilious ease. He is an advanced child, and seems to know it. He begins to sing tunelessly to himself, moved by a spirit of self-congratulation. Lily, observing him, cannot understand how it is that she, being so feminine, has produced so male a child. Is his dexterity, his musical sense, perhaps symptomatic of homosexuality? She feels restless, agitated. Jarvis and Lily speak. Few riddles in this household, which is barely three years old, and contains one non-speaking member, but let us examine such as there are, and note how quickly pleasantries, before morning coffee, can degenerate into animosity.
1 LILY: Margot Bailey is late. She’s always late. I shall have to speak to her.
2 JARVIS: She’s not the maid. She’s our doctor’s wife.
3 LILY: She’s an employee during office hours. It’s what was agreed.
4 JARVIS: Yes. But we have to be tactful.
5 LILY: She knows I’ve got people coming tonight; I need her to take Jonathon to playgroup. She’s late on purpose.
6 JARVIS: Margot is supposed to be looking after my office, not your child.
7 LILY: Our child. And if, as you claim, your business is twenty per cent down this year, then presumably the doctor’s wife has twenty per cent more time on her hands. I want to take Hilary to the hairdresser to get her hair cut. I can’t possibly take Jonathon. He swarms over everything.
8 JARVIS: Does it need cutting? It always seems the only good thing about her. Still, I suppose you know best. Is it all right with Madeleine?
9 LILY: Nothing is ever right with Madeleine. But I can’t even get a comb through Hilary’s hair, and I am paying,