The Tea Party

Contributed by Nicolas Papaconstantinou on 18/08/10

The coffee morning tradition which her mother daily adhered to had always baffled and bewildered Alice as a child, but now that she was an adult, it more often infuriated, as well.

“More tea? More tea?” Her mother squawked like a crazed thing, in-between earnest and furtive discussions of scandals local and remote, sporadic assaults on the various things win the world outside which you “couldn’t make up”, and only barely controlled flashes of bizarre non-sequitur.

The only thing more consistent than the odd banality was the strict adherence to social mores and decorum… there was no “language”, and never any talk of filth or brutish masculine aggression, unless of course it came up in the course of reportage.

Alice was uncertain which agitated her more – the nonsense, or the hypocrisy – and for the most part held her tongue.

As a child, she had suffered these mornings only in the most irritable of ways, taking every opportunity afforded to become fractious until she was sent to her room, though in her teens and during summer holidays from school, they had been more difficult to escape from. It was the curse of the middle sister that one will ever be expected to show some maturity – patience for bad behaviour eroded by the older sibling, and a requirement for nurturing and safeguarding the younger built into the role – and so Alice was more often expected to humour her mother than the other two.

“More tea?” Her mother squawked, coffee never on the menu, despite the tradition’s name. It was, Alice had realised in her youth, quite mad. But at the same time, it was in perfect keeping with everything else about her mother. Permanently composed as far as an outsider might ascertain, one had to be paying attention to note the almost imperceptible ringing of ceramic surfaces vibrating against each other, whenever her mother moved a cup and a saucer, or transported any other crockery about the place.

It had scared Alice as a child. Everything about her mother was barely held together, and the little girl’s developing instincts said that beneath those constantly shifting surfaces – which moved so fast that they appeared to stay still, unless you looked close – there was a crazed and random beast. There were signs of that creature already in her mother’s behaviour… a schedule slightly misunderstood, or a teapot not properly cleaned or dried would make her so dismayed that she wouldn’t be able to speak beyond a very quiet disappointment, but her daughters could tell not to test her mother on these things or any other things.

Not so her friends – her ever present, never changing coffee morning guests – minded her peculiar and officious behaviour. Or as Alice had decided before she had even reached her teenage years, not that they had it in them to notice.

Across the table from Alice – and the coffee-morning ladies always took the same places at the kitchen table, extending this constancy of positions to their spots on the sofas in the living room, if it ever came to that – was Dora, a small, brown-haired lady so timid and quiet that if ever a teaspoon was dropped into a saucer with any sort of force, she would noticeably flinch in her seat. Despite the amount of tea that she drank – when considering the woman’s diminutive size, Alice decided that she couldn’t consume more if she was drowning in the stuff! – Dora seemed forever on the edge of some narcoleptic episode. She was always drowsy, and when they were all younger, Alice and her sisters had found great amusement in betting on how long it would take her to slowly nod her head down onto the table, or on waiting till the right moment and dropping teaspoons loudly into saucers.

At Alice’s left, across the table from her mother, sits Kitty, her name the single most exciting thing about her. Kitty travels all over the world, though nobody seems to know why, so Alice is never sure when she will be around. But Kitty allows Alice’s mother to lead every conversation, despite the potential she has had in her life to be more worldly, and simply smiles along with every insane or morose thing Alice’s mother says. It is a smile that Alice has never entirely trusted, though – everything else about Kitty is static, disinterested, sedated, and there is nothing behind the endless smile, as far as Alice has every been able to see. As smiles go, Kitty’s might as well be painted onto air.

And then there is Harriet. Harriet sits on the same side of the table as Dora, ever at the right hand of Alice’s mother, and she is the nearest that Alice senior has to a closest friend, though the way they encounter and respond to the world, Alice thinks they might more accurately be titled co-conspirators.

Harriet is a long, tall, skinny lady, with wiry white hairs polluting a quite unfortunate unkempt hairdo. Her teeth protrude, and she has very little positive to recommend her, but that doesn’t stop she and Alice’s mother standing in quiet judgement of the world and everybody else in it. Harriet has never married, nor shown slightest interest in any man, despite the fraught and fraying sexual energy that Alice, as an adult, can see fluttering off her in waves. Harriet is also very outspoken on her feelings about “the gays”, and she takes an odd amount of pride and joy in having Alice’s mother commiserate with her on the topic.

“More tea?” Comes the squawk, though a glance would show that every cup is still at least half full, or at most half empty. Alice wonders at the scene.

She had thought herself free of this endless, repeated torment, occurring as it does with the same alarming regularity as Jeremy Kyle’s unwanted but impossible to ignore visits into her home. She had gone away to university. She had met a man and fallen in love. And met more men, in each case surprised that she had more love to fall into, but each time getting a little bit less soaked, or certainly less impressed by the moisture.

Much else had happened, but the thing that is most pertinent is that she had escaped, into her own adult life, many miles away.

But now she found herself forced into sitting silent witness to her mother’s daily performance once again. It wasn’t as if she could excuse herself. She was stuck here, thanks to the collapse of her marriage – an association that her mother had always openly told her and anybody else who would listen was never going to work, and one that had, in it’s collapse, taken her job and her home and her ability to exist without help on the other side of the country.

God help her, in a world suddenly full of closed doors, her mother’s house was the only refuge to be found.

There were all facts that had been effortlessly folded into the daily conversations she now had to sit through.

It was these gatherings that, early on, had taught Alice formative lessons in the surreality of society, and though they were lessons that she sometimes forgot, they were never far from the surface of her mind. The key one was this: society, etiquette, normality – all of these things are a tissue-thin membrane we use to protect us from the truth of our lives, which is that underneath this layer, each of us is a world of our own, roiling with un-sanity. Alice had found it easy, after so many years, to frame this through the metaphor of her mother – as she saw it, the more one clung to these rigid structures, such as the modern-day tea-parties that dominated her mother’s life, the more intensely odd and off-kilter the lives that are hidden from public view.

Alice had no idea how she had coped with all of this as a child – probably, she thought, by becoming the sort of person who would grow up to churn through a string of spiralling love-affairs with the wrong people, before eventually finding herself back where she started – but now, she had discovered a fun method of keeping her composure in the face of the absurdity.

Alice simply steps back one step into her head, to just below the surface where her imagination – the thing which causes all of those inconvenient foibles people tried to hide, after all – resides, and sees the coffee mornings through that filter, instead. She allows herself to see her mother and her mother’s guests as she believes they are experiencing the meetings, down where nobody else can see.

Dora is constant in her efforts and inability to stay awake, her head always only a moment away from dropping entirely into her tea, or a plate of biscuits or cakes. Kitty is a swivelling head, with beaming, too big smile attached, and for all that it’s creepy, at least that way you don’t have to notice the fierce lack of anything else behind it. Harriet… well, true, Harriet is a little sad. Her awkward and cartoonish features throw her more obvious sycophancy and unrequited love for Alice’s mother into sharp relief, but it is easier to feel sympathy for her in this place in Alice’s head, where she isn’t also a bigot.

And Alice’s mother… well, Alice’s mother is a wreck in this other place, but she capers like a loon, making ever more ridiculous statements of intent and opinion, and that is some kind of escape for Alice. In this other place, nobody drinks the tea anyway, so Alice’s mother never offers.