Remember Me

What luck?

Good morning! The bell goes again, harsh and reproachful. ‘I know you’re in there, hiding.’ Madeleine gives up, emerges into the light, goes upstairs, answers the bell. The gipsy’s plump round face is purple with cold, exhaustion and ill health. Her teeth are black and broken. A coat strains across her overfed body. Sweet tea and sugar buns. She has tears in her eyes, and not, as Madeleine prays, from conjunctivitis, or as a result of the cold wind, but because she has indeed been crying. Her husband has a bad heart; the hospital has sent her son-in-law home to die; her nephew has lost a leg from TB of the bone. The fares from Epping, where she lives, to Muswell Hill, where the habit of years, rather than common sense, still leads her, now exceed her takings.

‘Help me out, dear. Daffs at fifty, heather at ten. Lucky heather from bonny Scotland.’

Madeleine takes two sprigs of heather and parts with twenty pence out of the milk money.

‘Never mind,’ says Madeleine from her heart. ‘Never mind. Good times will come again. Or at any rate we had them once.’

And so they will, and so she did. Once Madeleine woke up singing. When she was pregnant with Hilary she even sang in her sleep. Jarvis heard her. Once Jarvis loved Madeleine, drew back chairs for her, brought her tea when she was tired; held her hand in the cinema: scowled at her admirers: brought her yellow daffodils fifty at a time.

Bad times come, but can’t undo the past. Mostly they come when we are ill, and old, and dying. Few of us die with dignity, or without pain. But how we once lived; when we were young! How we laughed!

‘I’ll tell your fortune,’ says the gipsy, drawing Madeleine’s strong, worn hand into her own red, dirty one, but Madeleine pulls it back.

‘I’ll do it cheap,’ says the gipsy. ‘You’re a kind lady. You’ve got a lucky face.’

‘No,’ says Madeleine. She is frightened. She looked into her own future, at the gipsy’s touch, and saw nothing but blackness. Well, she is depressed. That is what depression is, Madeleine thinks. The looking forward to blackness. Surely.

Good morning!

The gipsy goes. Madeleine goes down to her room to stand beside the sink, motionless, unable to make order out of the chaos of chipped and dirty china.

I am Madeleine, first wife of Jarvis, Hilary’s mother. I am Madeleine, thorn in Lily’s white soft flesh.

Lily, the second wife, Margot’s employer.

4

The doctor wakes, late. Margot is up: he can hear the sound of breakfast. The doctor closes his eyes again. These are the moments of the day he most values, when he is most himself and least the doctor. It is in these minutes, the doctor knows, these minutes between waking and sleeping, that the events of the past, of infancy and childhood, churned to the surface by the fragmented memory of dreams, lose their haphazard nature and make some kind of pattern; effecting, with luck, some small improvement in our nature, loosening the grip of resentment, altering expectation, refocusing obsession. Thus, building on the impacted rubble of the past, we construct the delicate filaments of the present. Or so the doctor thinks.

The doctor’s breathing becomes ragged, anxious. Eavesdrop: listen.

Oh, I am the doctor. There is no one to help me. All night the insomniacs have held me in their thoughts. Now, as the minutes advance, it is the waking sick who direct their thoughts towards me. I can feel them. See, doctor, my fingernail is septic: my throat is sore; I am feverish: my eye is blacked and you, doctor, must witness my wrongs. I have cancer, VD, psittacosis, anything, everything. It is Monday, day after Sunday, family day.

I am the doctor, little father to all the world, busiest of all on Mondays, the day after Sunday.

Up gets the doctor, Philip Bailey, Margot’s husband. He puts on a suit. He has to; he is the doctor. Once he was twenty-eight inches about the waist, now, with the passage of time and the arrival of the metric system, he is ninety-eight centimetres.

The doctor is forty-five years old. He has the stocky build and freckled face of some cheerful summer child. In the last couple of years the doctor’s skin, once so soft and pliable, has seemed to toughen and harden, lines are etching deep into his flesh and will go deeper still.

As Enid’s husband Sam, the estate agent, unkindly observed at a party, Philip is like a stale French cheese, growing old before it has matured, hardening inside, cracking round the edges.

All the same, on a good day Philip looks fifteen years younger than he is. It would be unreasonable to suppose Philip stopped growing older the day he married Margot, but Margot likes to suppose it. Margot is a good wife: she allows her husband to sap her energy and youth, and tax her good nature, and feels no resentment; or thinks she does not.

Philip stretches and bends his fingers, limbering them up for the day. Margot does not like her husband’s hands.

They express something his face and body do not; some stony, hidden aspiration away from her, Margot, his wife. The doctor’s hands are stiff, knuckly and red: their palms are bloodless and lightly lined. But his patients seem to trust them, which is just as well. With these hands the doctor manipulates their joints, presses into their vital organs, searches into their orifices, their dark and secret parts, judging them ill or well, good or bad, worthy of life or deserving death. With these hands, pulling down magic from the air, the doctor writes his runes, his indecipherable prescriptions for health.

Dislike his hands at your peril. You will not get better if you do.

5

Breakfast! Bon appétit! If you can.

The manner of the breakfast declares the aspiration of the family. Some breakfast standing, some sitting, some united in silence, some fragmented in noisiness and some, as in a television commercial, seeming to have all the time and money and goodwill in the world; and some in gloomy isolation. It is the meal at which we betray ourselves, being still more our sleeping than our waking selves.

Picture now the doctor’s household this Monday morning, breakfasting according to ritual in the large back kitchen. Philip, the father, bathed, shaved, dressed, apparently benign, eats bacon and eggs delicately prepared by Margot, reads the Guardian she has placed beside his plate, and ignores the other members of his family as best he can. At eight forty-five his receptionist Lilac will arrive, and open his mail, and prepare his appointment cards. At nine the doctor will rise, put down his paper, peck his wife, nod to his children and go through to the surgery to attend to the needs of the world. Lettice and Laurence sit opposite each other. Lettice is thirteen, neat, pretty, and precise, with her mother’s build and round, regular face, but without her mother’s overwhelming amiability. If the mother were unexpectedly to bare a breast, it would surely be in the interests of some cosmic medical examination. If the daughter did so, who would doubt her erotic intent? Laurence is a dark and looming boy of fourteen, with a bloodless, troubled complexion and a bony body, as if his father’s hands had at last found expression in a whole person. There is little other resemblance between them.

Listen now to their outer voices, their conversations, their riddles, comprehended only by themselves, the secret society that composes the family.

1 LETTICE: Dad, can I have the middle of the paper?

2 DAD: What for?

3 LETTICE: To read.

4 DAD: You are a nuisance.

5 LAURENCE: Mum, I haven’t got a fork.

6 MARGOT: Sorry, dear. I’ll get one … But why do you need a fork, if you’re only eating cereal?

7 LAURENCE: Sorry. So I am.

8 LETTICE: Why don’t we ever have unsweetened cereal?

9 MARGOT: Because no one eats it.

10 LETTICE: I do. The sweetened is fattening, anyway, and not worth the extra money. It said so in Which. I think we should have unsweetened and add our own sugar.

11 LAURENCE: Lettice, you are not the centre of the universe.

12 LETTICE: I know that. The sun is.

13 LAURENCE: You are wrong. The sun is a star of average size which is itself revolving, with thousands of millions of other stars, in one galaxy among millions in a universe that might well be boundless. If you travelled at the speed of light – 186,300 miles a second, that is – it would take 6,000 million years – about 20,000 times the total period that life has existed on earth, to travel only to the limits of what we can observe from earth with our very limited technology.

14 LETTICE: So what?

15 LAURENCE: So nothing matters.

And Laurence helps himself to the last of the honey-coated wheat puffs, the creamy top of the milk, and adds the last scrape of the marmalade in the jar for good measure.

These domestic riddles can be thus translated:

1 LETTICE: Dad, take notice of me and my changing needs.

2 DAD: (cautious) What kind of need?

3 LETTICE: Don’t worry. Merely intellectual. All the same, I am growing up.

4 DAD: Oh dear. More change.

5 LAURENCE: Father is taking notice of Lettice again. Mother, will you please take some notice of me? My needs are not being properly met.

6 MARGOT: Perhaps I have been rather remiss. On the other hand, I don’t actually want to have to get to my feet on your behalf. Do you insist, my dear? We have a good relationship, you and I.

7 LAURENCE: Quite. It’s the thought that counts. Thank you.

8 LETTICE: Mother, father cares for me but I’m not so sure about you.

9 MARGOT: I have so very many people to look after.

10 LETTICE: I knew it. You want me to be plain and ugly and fat; and what’s more I’m a better housekeeper than you, so there.

11 LAURENCE: Don’t be rude to my mother, just because she’s yours as well. There are more important people in the world than you.

12 LETTICE: Father is important. You’re not.

13 LAURENCE: Father is not as important as you think. Enough of all this emotional nonsense, anyway. Facts are interesting, important, reassuring, and what’s more, I know more of them than father, for all his air of maturity.

14 LETTICE: Who cares about facts? They’re meaningless.

15 LAURENCE: All right then. We’ll all go on as we have before, sparring for position over the breakfast table. God give me strength.

The day has begun.

6

Breakfast time! Bon appétit! If you can manage it.

Jarvis and Lily can. They breakfast in companionable silence. At ten Jarvis will go to his office. He wears a Chairman-Mao blue jacket, bought for him by Lily from an expensive shop. Jarvis would prefer to wear a shirt, tie and jacket, but Lily plans otherwise; and she is, he acknowledges, quite right to do so. Those now leapfrogging over his talented head towards senior partnerships wear jeans, beards, and show their navels on hot days.

At ten to ten, Jarvis puts down The Times and smiles at his wife. Jonathon, wiped and cleaned, has already been set in his playpen to play with his educational toys; which, obligingly enough, he seems prepared to do: posting bright plastic shapes into a plastic letter box with supercilious ease. He is an advanced child, and seems to know it. He begins to sing tunelessly to himself, moved by a spirit of self-congratulation. Lily, observing him, cannot understand how it is that she, being so feminine, has produced so male a child. Is his dexterity, his musical sense, perhaps symptomatic of homosexuality? She feels restless, agitated. Jarvis and Lily speak. Few riddles in this household, which is barely three years old, and contains one non-speaking member, but let us examine such as there are, and note how quickly pleasantries, before morning coffee, can degenerate into animosity.

1 LILY: Margot Bailey is late. She’s always late. I shall have to speak to her.

2 JARVIS: She’s not the maid. She’s our doctor’s wife.

3 LILY: She’s an employee during office hours. It’s what was agreed.

4 JARVIS: Yes. But we have to be tactful.

5 LILY: She knows I’ve got people coming tonight; I need her to take Jonathon to playgroup. She’s late on purpose.

6 JARVIS: Margot is supposed to be looking after my office, not your child.

7 LILY: Our child. And if, as you claim, your business is twenty per cent down this year, then presumably the doctor’s wife has twenty per cent more time on her hands. I want to take Hilary to the hairdresser to get her hair cut. I can’t possibly take Jonathon. He swarms over everything.

8 JARVIS: Does it need cutting? It always seems the only good thing about her. Still, I suppose you know best. Is it all right with Madeleine?

9 LILY: Nothing is ever right with Madeleine. But I can’t even get a comb through Hilary’s hair, and I am paying, and it’s a very good hairdresser. Today’s the only day I could get an appointment.

10 JARVIS: Expensive?

11 LILY: I hope you don’t grudge your own daughter a haircut.

12 JARVIS: Couldn’t you do it?

13 LILY: If you worry so much about money, why not spend less on whisky?

Which being translated is:

1 LILY: Am I to be left all alone with this child? I cannot take the responsibility.

2 JARVIS: Other wives can cope, why not you?

3 LILY: Because I enjoy a superior social status in the world, and deserve to do so.

4 JARVIS: In this household, I am the one with tact.

5 LILY: Everyone’s against me.

6 JARVIS: My needs are more vital than yours.

7 LILY: You’re twenty per cent less important than when I married you. However, I love you and am even looking after your daughter by your first marriage.

8 JARVIS: I did not intend to deny Madeleine altogether.

9 LILY: Your first marriage spoils my life. I have to make the best of what’s left.

10 JARVIS: You’re extravagant with my money.

11 LILY: You’re mean.

12 JARVIS: You’re not earning your keep.

13 JARVIS: You’re a drunk.

At which Jarvis kisses his wife, hastily, before worse befalls and does a quick farewell soft-shoe shuffle for Jonathon, who half-sneers, half-smiles in response, and departs for the office.

And the day begins.

7

Listen now, to Lily’s inner voice, welling up into the moral silence of her busy after-breakfast home. Jonathon playing good as gold, sunlight streaming, radio singing.

Oh, I am no longer the butcher’s daughter; I am the architect’s wife, waiting for the arrival of Margot the part-time secretary, stacking well-rinsed plates in serried rows in the dishwasher (soundproofed) reserving the wooden-handled knives and forks for a warm soapy hand rinse in the plastic bowl. (Lily’s mother, Ida, on her wild Australasian shore, taught Lily how to care so well for possessions, both material and human, there being so little of either about.) How pleasant everything is, since I became the architect’s wife. All things around me ordained, considered, under control. The house is well converted, the plasterwork is sound, the polished floor blocks on the ground floor are both practical and attractive; the carpets upstairs are both luxurious and hard-wearing. Is this not what Jarvis has worked for; what I myself have made possible for him? How happy we are – like children. Surely nothing can go wrong?

Lily and Jarvis! What games they play, in bed and out of it. Their pleasure, out of doors, is to rummage through the builders’ rubble skips which line the streets, and acquire the treasure, within, and jeer at the philistines who flung them out. Their house at No. 12 Adelaide Row is a treasure home of trophies – here a carved Jacobean chest, once horribly painted green; there a pretty rosewood bureau, once broken and abandoned, now beautifully restored; a Coalbrookdale footscraper, once flaky with rust, now sandblasted and splendid; even the watercolour landscapes which line the hall were found in a folder in the middle of a bundle of old comics (in themselves items of value and interest) and have been valued at £500; and the stripped doors in the stripped doorframes, such an elegant contrast to the coffee colour of the walls, once lay in a demolition yard waiting for the bonfire.

Nothing wrong with such restitutions. On the contrary. We must rescue the nation’s past, if we wish to rescue our own. Jarvis says so. Jarvis knows. In this wisdom Jarvis has educated Lily.

Lily and Jarvis.

When Madeleine and Jarvis lived at 12 Adelaide Row it had no such social, aesthetic and emotional distinction. It was an ordinary house, practical and ugly. In Madeleine’s day, Jarvis’s talents never bloomed. How could they? Madeleine made no concessions to the beauties of the material world. Tat and junk, she’d say, trendy rubbish, vicious Victoriana, and millions starving in Ethiopia, or burning in Vietnam, wherever the season’s human ulcer happened to manifest itself; can’t you, Jarvis, turn your mind to anything more serious than a rotten old sampler badly embroidered by some miserable child in 1825? If you want to throw your money away, give it to Shelter and help house the homeless.

Because you are unhappy, Madeleine, shall there be no small delights for Jarvis?

No, there shan’t.

And Jarvis earned £5,000 a year as an architect, at a time when the sum meant something, but even this Madeleine could not approve. Shouldn’t you be a council architect, she’d ask? Shouldn’t you be turning your undoubted talent to some useful end? Instead of designing ridiculous modern villas on insanitary sunny slopes for ex-whores, property developers and other social criminals?

And so of course Jarvis should, and he knew it, which made matters worse. Madeleine was always right.

Nonetheless, as Lily later pointed out, Madeleine used the money Jarvis earned at his immoral tasks. Madeleine went on countless coach holidays with little Hilary, leaving Jarvis behind at the office, earning; and believing (as they both did; well, at any rate, she did) in the immorality of sexual possessiveness, Madeleine passed many a stopover night (or so it was imagined by Jarvis, and later Lily) in bed with the current courier; exercising her sexual rights in bleak bedrooms overlooking the teeming roads of Europe and the East. Madeleine even went as far as Turkey once, and heaven knows what oriental sexual athleticism that didn’t lead to! And what happened to little Hilary, alone (or so one hopes) in the next bedroom? How did little Hilary regard her mother’s quest for fun and self-expression; returning from abroad, as she would, even yet sulkier, blanker, and snottier than when she left? Hilary’s mind not so much broadened, as stunned.

Poor Jarvis, poor father.

Oh, I am Lily, the architect’s wife. I want Jarvis to be happy, to be himself, to be with me. I even want Hilary, Jarvis’s child. I want Hilary to be happy too, to make up for all the things she’s lost, all the things Madeleine has taken from her. I want to show everyone what a truly successful person I am: wife, daughter, mother, stepmother. Sister? No, don’t think of that.

Lily waits for Margot to arrive. Lily, waiting, telephones the hairdresser, and makes an appointment for that very morning, to have her own and Hilary’s done. It had not, until now, been her firm intention to do so, more a speculation for Jarvis’s benefit. Margot’s lateness, and the irritation it causes, drives Lily to action. Once done, she regrets it; how is she going to fit everything in? Too late now.

The milk, forgotten, would have boiled over if it hadn’t been prudently placed to heat (if slowly) on the simmer plate. Lily always puts the milk on the simmer plate.

Good Lily!

And here we are at last. The Victorian doorbell rings and here is Margot the doctor’s wife; she is late; she is breathless, but she is here. She has no key. Lily is very retentive of front-door keys. And her coffee is ready.

See, how hospitable, how tolerant, how understanding of the needs of others am I? Lily the architect’s wife! The servant is late and I’m giving her coffee!

Alas, the milk has turned in the pan. The coffee is undrinkable. Lily and Margot unite in deploring a world now so crassly run that the very milk is delivered to the door half-sour, or what passes for sour in these days of homogenisation, sterilisation and so on. A new cup of coffee is made, with different milk.

‘I was wondering,’ asks Lily, at last, ‘if you could possibly take Jonathon to playgroup today?’

These two women do not compose a family: they are not a secret society: there is little need for riddles. Lily (in her white cheesecloth Laura Ashley dress, unspotted by breakfast) can ask Margot (in her navy C & A skirt and pink fluffy M & S jumper) a straight question and get a straight reply.

‘Of course,’ says Margot. ‘Since it’s Monday. Invoice day. I’ll get those done with no trouble.’ There are, this month, some twenty per cent fewer invoices than there were in the same month a year ago. Lily is quite right to assume that Jarvis and his partners in architecture are in difficulties. There has been a twenty per cent redundancy in their staff, a twenty per cent inflation during the year, and twenty per cent drop in business. Lily lies awake at night, just occasionally worrying about it all, but Jarvis does not.

Jarvis has an inheritance; private means. How exotic, Lily used to feel, when first she met him, this simple fact. Jarvis’s inheritance. Later she came to see it as something which stood between Jarvis and the proper acceptance of reality – by which she meant, of course, herself. Once or twice she has even complained of having been seduced by his past. No one in New Zealand had inheritances. It seemed to be symptomatic of the English.

‘I’m going to take Hilary to have her hair cut,’ Lily announces. ‘It’s such a mess.’

‘Is she off school?’ enquires Margot. Margot feels tenderly protective towards Hilary, this ugly duckling in a household of swans.

‘I’ll take her out of school,’ says Lily. ‘No hassle. She only has swimming this morning and I’m sure she’s forgotten her things anyway. I’ll tell anyone who asks that she’s going to the dentist. But they won’t ask. They won’t know and even if they did they won’t care. Hilary is totally anonymous in that place. Two thousand five hundred children in a school; what madness! Comprehensive! My husband was quite prepared to send Hilary to a private school, but of course Madeleine has her principles, for which poor little Hilary has to pay the price.’

Lily likes to emphasise, when she can, the fact of Jarvis’s basic generosity towards his first family. Jarvis rashly leaves letters from his ex-wife’s solicitors for Margot to open and deal with; Lily wishes he wouldn’t.

‘I may be delayed,’ Lily murmurs. ‘You know what hairdressers are like. Do you have to leave sharp at twelve thirty? I was wondering whether you could possibly collect Jonathon at twelve forty-five?’

Margot, the implication is, has arrived late and so in all fairness should surely stay late.

‘The children come home for lunch,’ says Margot. ‘I must have it ready.’

‘Don’t they have school dinner?’

‘They don’t care for them.’

Silence. What, children thus unregulated and untramelled? Jonathon, better brought up, always eats what is set before him.

‘Personally, I never eat lunch,’ says Lily, blandly. ‘So bad for the figure.’

I live a good and useful life, murmurs stocky Margot in her heart. I would be ashamed to go hungry in order to be beautiful. Is there something wrong with me? No. I am a good and serviceable person, wife and mother. My reward is in my children’s love of me, and mine in them; and my soft, familiar, permanent bed. I am a nice person. Your husband, yes your husband, told me so many years ago. He has forgotten – at least I hope he has – but I have not, and true he was drunk at the time, and married to Madeleine, which may have distorted his judgment, but Jarvis told me then that he preferred nice girls to beautiful girls! and what’s more that my nipples were pale and blunt and pink and that’s what he liked, he couldn’t bear the harsh brown aggressive kind, and that, I’m sorry to say, is what yours are, slim hungry wife of my employer; I can see them through your dress.