“Happiness”
by
Sylvia Townsend Warner
‘The bathroom’s the awkwardest feature,’ said Mr. Naylor, of Elwes & Sons, house agents, ‘being situated on the ground floor. People don’t like ground-floor bathrooms. You might say, they just won’t hear of them.’
‘No, I suppose not. Yet …’ Lavinia Benton broke off.
‘I know what you were going to say, Mrs. Benton. You were going to say, Why not convert the dressing room upstairs, leaving the bathroom for what one might call a playroom, or a children’s lounge, or a study, if there happened to be no family. Once we’d got the bath out, it could be called ideal for that, being so inordinately large for a bathroom. But then the pipes would have to be carried upstairs. Think of the plumbing, Mrs. Benton! Prohibitive! No buyer would contemplate it, not for this class of residence—it isn’t as if this were one of those old oak jobs. And I understand you don’t want to let the estate in for any extra expense. So there we are, I’m afraid. Back where we started from!’
Mr. Naylor had, in fact, scotched a snake that wasn’t there. Lavinia’s ‘Yet’ had been provoked by the reflection that an increasingly large acreage of southern England was occupied between 7.30 and 8.30 a.m. by people resignedly bathing on ground level. Not so resignedly, either, since there are always buyers for bungalows. Both Mr. Petherick, of Petherick, Petherick & Sampson, and Mr. Cox, of Ransom & Titters, had already explained that Aller Lodge, the late Miss Esther Jeudwine’s brick-built, two-storey residence in sound repair, would have been easy enough to sell if only it had been a bungalow. All a matter of social psychology, thought Lavinia who, as a columnist on superior Women’s Pages, was accustomed to making something out of not much; a mass apprehension of being surprised with no clothes on, which if not primitive, since primitive man had other and more pressing things to be surprised by, must certainly go a long way back, being later reinforced by class distinction—the wealthy are draped, the poor go bare—and Christianity’s insistence on modesty; for though a fakir can be venerable in a light handful of marigolds, an archdeacon can scarcely leave off his gaiters. In short, the discomposure of being surprised with no clothes on is, like the pleasurability of possessing a virgin, one of the things long taken for granted—and really even more of an idée reçue‚ being subscribed to by both sexes alike. Yet here was this mass apprehension, fortified by tradition, smoothed by acceptance, part of the British way of life, suddenly ceasing to function when brought into bungalows, where the hazards that might justify it—housebreakers, mad dogs, cars out of control, voyeurs, private detectives, almost anything, in fact, except the atom bomb—would be much more on the cards. But one must remember that bathrooms being so recent an introduction, public opinion could not have made up its mind about them yet, and was bound to be rather hypothetical.
Lavinia became aware that Mr. Naylor was observing her with sympathy, but at the same time giving little coughs. Of course. The poor man wanted to go.
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