What can you do if you are thirty and, suddenly, turning the corner of

Mr Reginald Peacock's Day

He hated the way his wife woke him up in the morning. She did it on purpose, of course. It showed that she was angry with him. But he was not going to show her that he was angry. But it was really dangerous to wake up an artist like that! It made him feel bad for hours — simply hours.

She came into the room in her working clothes, with a handkerchief over her head, just to show him that she had been awake and working for hours. She called in a low warning voice: 'Reginald!'
'Eh! What! What's that? What's the matter?'
'It's time to get up. It's half-past eight.' And then she left the room, shutting the door quietly behind her. He supposed that she felt very pleased with herself.
He turned over in the big bed. His heart felt heavy. She seemed to enjoy making life more difficult for him; more difficult than it was already. She made an artist's life impossible. She wanted to pull him down, to make him like herself.
What was the matter with her? What did she want? Didn't he have three times as many pupils now as he did when they were first married? Didn't he earn three times as much money? Hadn't he paid for everything they owned? He now had begun to pay for Adrian's school, too. She didn't have any money, but he never said that to her. Never!
When you married a woman she wanted everything. Nothing was worse for an artist than marriage. Artists should wait until they are over forty before they get married. Why had he married her? He asked himself this question about three times a day, but he never could answer it. She had caught him at a weak moment.
Looking back, he saw himself as a poor young thing, half-child, half-wild bird. He was totally unable to manage bills and things like that. Well, she had tried hard to change him, and she was changing him with her early morning trick. An artist ought to wake slowly, he thought, moving down in the warm bed. He began to imagine delightful pictures, one after the other. The pictures ended with his latest, most charming pupil putting her arms around him and covering him with her long hair. 'Awake my love!...'
As usual, while the bath water ran, Reginald Peacock tried his voice.
' When her mother sees her before the laughing mirror, Tying up her shoes and tying up her hair!
He sang softly at first, listening to the quality of his voice, until he came to the third line:
'Often she thinks, were this wild thing married ...' and when he got to the last word his voice became a shout, and a glass on the bathroom shelf shook ...
Well, there was nothing wrong with his voice, he thought, as he jumped into the bath and covered his soft pink body with soap. He could fill a very large theatre with that voice! He sang again as he took the towel and dried himself quickly.
He returned to his bedroom and began to do his exercises -deep breathing, bending forward and back. He was terribly afraid of getting fat. Men in his job often did get fat. However, there was no sign of fatness at present. He was, he decided, just right. In fact, he felt deeply satisfied when he looked at himself in the mirror dressed in a black coat, dark grey trousers, grey socks and a black and silver tie. He was not vain, of course — he hated vain men - no, the feeling he had when he looked at himself was purely artistic.
People often asked him if he was really English. They could never believe that he didn't have some Southern blood.
His singing had an emotional quality that was not English ...
The door began to open and Adrian's head appeared.
'Please, Father, Mother says breakfast is ready, please.'
'Very well,' said Reginald. Then just as Adrian disappeared: 'Adrian!'
'Yes, father.'
'You haven't said "Good morning".'
A few months ago, Reginald had spent a weekend with a very important family, where the father received his little sons in the morning and shook hands with them. Reginald thought that this was charming. He immediately started to do the same in his own home, but Adrian felt silly when he had to shake hands with his own father every morning. And why did his father always sound like he was singing to him instead of talking?
Reginald walked into the dining-room and sat down. There was a pile of letters, a copy of the newspaper and a little covered dish in front of him. He looked quickly at the letters and then at his breakfast. There were two thin pieces of bacon and one egg.
'Don't you want any bacon?' he asked.
'No, I prefer an apple. I don't need bacon every morning.'
Now, what did she mean? Did she mean that she didn't want to cook bacon for him every morning?
'If you don't want to cook the breakfast,' he said, 'why don't you have a servant? We have enough money, and you know how I hate to see my wife doing the work. I know that all the servants we had in the past were mistakes. They stopped my practising and I couldn't have any pupils in the house. But now, you have stopped trying to find the right kind of servant. You could teach a servant, couldn't you?'
'But I prefer to do the work myself; it makes life so much more peaceful ... Run along, Adrian dear, and get ready for school.'
'Oh, no, that's not it!' Reginald pretended to smile. 'You do the work yourself, because, I don't know why, you want me to feel bad. You may not realize this, but it's true.' He felt pleased with himself and opened an envelope ...