A Place for Everything

Charles was using his Parker pen to write a letter. For thirty years, ever since he was fifteen he’d managed to avoid using ball point pens or any of those other hateful writing implements dreamt up by Biro and his rivals. The letter he was writing was of grave importance calling for impeccable handwriting and the use of the best quality Basildon Bond writing paper.

The writing pad was centred on a blotter placed directly on his desk and to the right of that, an Oxford Complete Dictionary and Roget’s Thesaurus lay neatly one on top of the other. He was unlikely to use either but their presence and their placing gave him a sense of security.  A bottle of Dalwhinnie whisky glinted in the light from a green-shaded desk lamp and beside that a half-filled glass waited within reach of his hand. Dalwhinnie was a single malt he kept only for special occasions.

A bottle of ink, Stephen’s Blue Black, recommended for use with a fountain pen, was set carefully on an oval glass stand at the back of the desk. Charles preferred to use Stephen’s above all other brands of ink but nowadays it was hard to come by. This bottle had been delivered only after a prolonged search on the internet.

Charles considered this letter to be the most important he had ever written and he had to concentrate fully to make sure that his pen didn’t stray from the ruled lines that showed faintly through the plain paper from beneath the page. As a child he’d been meticulous about writing clearly and he’d never allowed his writing to slope across the page like that of some of his school friends. Ever since his boyhood he’d been fussy about everything in his life being shipshape and Bristol fashion, a phrase that might have come straight from his mother’s lips. His pyjamas had always been neatly folded and placed directly under his pillow each morning. It was a habit that remained with him. Charles couldn’t bear slovenly behaviour.

His mother had been proud of his neat habits. 

‘Our Charlie can’t abide untidiness,’ she’d tell her friends. ‘He insists upon his shirts being properly ironed. No creases down the sleeves, you know. He likes to see them folded correctly and laid in his drawer in a certain way. Grey shirts to the left, white to the right and blue in the middle.’

On more than one occasion he’d seen a look of disbelief on the faces of her friends but it was something she obviously preferred to ignore. Occasionally she’d glance up at him with an expression that said, ‘Their opinion is of no importance to us.’ 

Sometimes he’d wondered if she really, in her heart of hearts, approved of his tidiness. At one time, after his shoes had been polished to a high shine, he caught her rubbing the toecaps on the stone steps at the back door. 

‘Your shoes never seem to wear out, Charlie,’ she sighed.  ‘Mrs Hughes say’s that her boy Jimmy wears his shoes out in a month. I thought yours might look a bit more manly if they were scuffed just a little.’

Another time, after he’d rearranged the peas and carrots on his plate so that they didn’t mingle with each other, she’d said crossly, ‘There is such a thing as being too pernickety.’ 

That had hurt. He left his dinner that day and when he looked up the word pernickety, thinking it might have been a swear word such as used by other boys at school, the dictionary definition was fastidious or, easier for a boy to understand, over precise.   Charles thought it was impossible to be over precise.

Although at school he was considered to be quite a clever boy, his ‘A ‘level results had not lived up to his teachers’ expectations. 

His mother said, ‘Never mind, son. University life might not be all it’s cracked up to be. There’s more than one way of skinning a cat.’

The thought of a skinned cat had upset him. It was a messy idea but he knew what she meant. 

After that Charles continued to live at home with his mother. The arrangement seemed to suit both of them. She’d always given him to understand that his tidiness made life easier for her and he could rely on her to keep his vegetables separate from each other on his plate. 

He found a job as a junior in a nice clean office and over the years moved on until eventually he’d reached the dizzy heights of company secretary. His office now was an immaculate place of perfect preciseness, his business affairs a paradigm of perfection. It had to be said that, as he’d moved up through the various levels of management, he’d encountered a few problems with the members of his office staff. But three years ago that had resolved itself when Angela Devine had been appointed as Charles’ secretary. 

‘Leave the office personnel to me,’ she said. 

Angela had taken it upon herself to deal with all staff problems before they reached his desk. In fact she’d been so accommodating that after six months he married her. They set up home in a large double fronted house situated in a good residential district. The house was surrounded by symmetrical lawns that were neatly cut and with borders that were filled with the most compact of flowers, guaranteed not to get out of hand.

The year that followed Charles and Angela’s nuptials reached a zenith of harmonious impeccability and made Charles happier than he’d ever been. That perfect state of affairs remained until, on the first anniversary of their marriage, the twins were born.

With the twins came an unprecedented time of chaos and discomfort. Tins of Johnson’s baby powder and jars of Vaseline began to desecrate the bathroom shelves. Bottles of baby milk occupied the spaces in the fridge that previously were reserved for beer cans and wine.  Howls and cries rent the air night and day, making sleep or sensitive telephone calls or listening to music a thing of the past. Unpleasant aromas drifted through the rooms where baby clothes were strewn over the furniture, on the floor and over the banisters. Ridiculous fluffy toys lurked in the most unexpected places, waiting to disrupt the comfort of unsuspecting, innocent souls’ intent on minding their own business. 

      Soon he realised that the time of calm that had accompanied Angela’s pregnancy had been the lull before the storm. After the birth she’d become prone to unpredictable outbursts of irritability and moodiness. It seemed to Charles that the former ambience of the house had become disturbed and distracted. He formed the opinion that fatherhood, was not all it was cracked up to be. 

At first, with a new, very efficient secretary, Patience Makepeace, Charles took refuge in his office. He told himself that here was a place he could depend on. Desks and filing cabinets gave an overall impression of order and peacefulness. Foreign objects could find no resting place in a ‘well run’ office. But in the quiet atmosphere his mind was not content. Guilty thoughts and feelings of inadequacy littered his psyche. Becoming a father had changed Charles too.

Over the next three years the chaos that started with the birth of the twins had begun a crescendo that seemed unlikely to ever come to a climax. Sticky fingers left their mark on arms of chairs, banisters, door knobs and doors. Fluffy toys were now replaced with even more hazardous objects such as trucks and trains.

 At that point Charles rented a flat and moved out of the house. He solved his conscience with a hefty allowance for Angela and the boys. 

After a few weeks of living alone and having become accustomed to sharing his life with a woman, Charles invited his secretary, to move in with him.

Patience responded with alacrity.

      ‘Of course, I’ll come to live with you,’ she said.

In the office Charles had been impressed by her skills of organisation and diplomacy and as an older woman, she was forty seven, the risk of more progeny was small. 

But what had at first seemed a good idea soon began to pall. It took Charles less than two weeks to realise his mistake. It seemed that Patience’s organisational skills didn’t stretch further than the office and a bathroom towel rail festooned with dripping nylon tights and underwear was beyond any kind of tolerance that he could muster. Burnt saucepans soaking in the sink added to his distress and nail varnish cooling in the fridge pushed him over the brink. 

When he expelled Patience from his bed and flat she promptly resigned from her job as his secretary. Then a series of temps from an agency almost drove him to distraction while a suggestion of reconciliation with Angela fell on stony ground.  

Now, alone in his flat, at the desk that was the only furniture he’d brought from his marital home, he laid his pen down at the top of his blotter, as near to centre as his eye could judge. From the desk drawer he took out two bottles of tablets and tipped them out on to a clean paper handkerchief. He lined the tablets up into four equal rows, then fetched a glass of water from the kitchen. Four at a time proved difficult to swallow so he resorted to taking them two at a time. When the paper handkerchief was empty he folded it and placed in the wastepaper basket. He replaced the Thesaurus and the Dictionary in two adjoining spaces on the book Oxford Book of Quotations and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Then, after downing the rest of the whisky, he picked up his Parker pen and signed the letter to his mother.  After replacing the cap and before returning the pen to its cradle near the ink bottle he stroked the smooth lines of the barrel, then relaxing peacefully into his ergonomically designed executive chair, Charles closed his eyes.