Text 4 taking over

Things certainly changed for the better when we moved to our new house. Gloria, George’s mother, had her granny flat above the garage, George had his study which he called his “den”, the children had a large sunny playroom and I had the best view in Cambridgeshire. And a lock on my door.

I also gave up cooking. It was not a wild feminist decision (You’ve got nothing to do all day, George, why don’t you get the dinner for a change?) but an admission of feminine weakness. The new kitchen was banked with electronic controls like a space station, and all the equipment was hidden discreetly behind panelled doors, so that I kept opening the dishwasher to get out the milk and putting the dirty washing in the fridge.

A couple of weeks after we moved in, I decided to roast a joint of beef; and then decided to go out and buy a take-away chicken when the instruction manual instead of issuing instructions about roasting on number 4 for 20 minutes to a pound, started babbling about the unique benefits of combining Infra technology & Turbo technology.

“Let me look at it, Pauline,” George took the manual firmly out of my hand. “The trouble with you is that you don’t bother to read the instructions properly. I say, it is amazing. Do you realize you can bake and roast simultaneously on six different levels?”

I couldn’t see why I’d want to perform this culinary feat, any more than I understood why the ceramic hob needed two heat zones to boil an egg or what the microwave thought in its two stage memory.

Once he had mastered all the masculine stuff about thermostatically controlled oven heat and such like, George opened his first cookery book surreptitiously, as though it was called “One Hundred Amusing Ways of Making Love” rather than “The Good Housekeeping Infra Turbo Cookbook.” He didn’t go so far as to conceal it in a plain wrapper but shyly hid the cover with his arms if anyone came into the kitchen and caught him with it. I noticed that he read “The Art of French Cookery” with far more concentration than he ever gave to “The Beginner.”

When Gloria tactlessly told him that now that he had nothing much to do, he could help a bit more around the house (something I’d never dream of saying since I felt permanently guilty about having a wonderful job when George was out of work), she probably expected him to push the Hoover¹ about once a week and produce an occasional steak and crinkle chips to rapturous applause from the womenfolk. But George, while doing very little Hoover-pushing, plunged right in at the Cordon bleu end of cooking, marinating meat in wine and herbs, grilling fish over fennel twigs, baking his own bread.

Proudly bearing his first batch of bread, covered with a damp tea towel, up the stairs to the airing cupboard to raise the dough, he had bumped into Gloria putting away freshly ironed laundry.

“Let me do that, George,” she said, attempting to take the tin from him, but George hung on grimly. “Leave me alone, mother. It’s wholemeal and I’m going to put cracked wheat on it.”

“I suppose it’s all right,” she said, bringing me a cup of coffee in the studio and reporting the incident, “but it’s not very manly, is it, cooking?” I realized she had come to be reassured. “The best chefs in the world are men,” I said.

“That’s true.” She sipped her coffee reflectively. “But they don’t go modelling clothes in their spare time, do they?”

“I’m sure George won’t make a habit of it,” I said. There seemed to be no point in worrying Gloria by telling her that George was rather taken with the idea. He told me in bed one night (the only time and place we seemed to have time to talk to each other), that since Sybilla’s fashion pictures had turned out so well he was thinking of getting an agent.

“And is it that easy?” – I for one always found it most unrelaxing being told to relax in front of cameras for our publicity pictures.

“Easier than trying to sell out-of-date packaging units to people who don’t want to buy them,” he said, taking me in his arms. “I hated it, you know, Pauly.”

So this is how our new life went on. I had two babies to look after, and three shops to worry about, to say nothing about designing. It was a relief that George had taken to the new kitchen technology with such enthusiasm.

As for modelling, he did a session from time to time but we never mentioned it in front of Gloria.

(by S. Lowe, A. Ince)