Remember Me (10 page)

JAMIE
: What a lucky man you are, Jarvis. To have a wife who looks like an angel and cooks like a demon.

JUDY
: If you wanted cooking, Jamie, you should have stayed with Albertine.

Albertine, Jamie’s ex-wife, who once played the wife in
Cosy Nook,
and now plays wife to Judy’s ex-husband.

JAMIE
: I’m afraid my present wife is looking for trouble.

JUDY
: Don’t get at me in public, Jamie, I don’t like it.

JAMIE
: Lily, do me a favour and pour me some coffee.

LILY
: But you already have some.

JAMIE
: Yes, but just top it up. It’s so delightful when you bend over.

JUDY
: I know I’m flat-chested. I’m so sorry. There’s no pleasing Jamie tit-wise. Albertine had a front like a shelf and wore corsets, and he couldn’t seem to fancy that, either. What it is to be a woman. You say anything about a man’s cock in public and they feel entitled to murder you; but they feel at perfect liberty to complain about your tits.

Oh, I am Margot, the doctor’s wife. I cannot get used to these new people, their new manners. Boobs is bad enough, descriptive of clumsiness and distress. Tits? A throwaway word for throwaway things. My own honest breasts scarcely looked at, scarcely considered, except when of use to others, feeding the babies or as a source of pleasure to my husband. My breasts are for other people, not for me. They are my offering to my family. Tit-wise! Oh, I am the doctor’s wife. I am staid. I am dull. But I am better than these others. My children are happy, and ordinary. By our children, you shall know us.

All the same, I want to go home. I want to be safe I am frightened. Philip, look after me. It is a quarter to one. How long since we’ve been out this late?

But Lily is talking. And now Philip is alert and watching her, woken from his trance. Lily is excited, liberated. Her little white teeth gleam: her head is thrown back: silvery hair thick and wild: neck white, marked by little bruises Jarvis made.

LILY
: I am tired of being nice about Madeleine. Madeleine is a neurotic bitch. Madeleine has her claws in Jarvis and she won’t let go. She takes our money. I want new curtains and why can’t I have them? Because of Madeleine. Madeleine sits about on her arse waiting to be fed and clothed, and the law says Jarvis has to do it. The world’s full of women like that, and the law’s always on their side. He never wanted to marry her in the first place: but he won’t fight her: he’s soft. Jarvis looks after Madeleine’s interests: what about mine? What about Jonathon’s? Three years since the divorce and she still keeps acting as if he were out on some kind of loan to me. If her fuses blow, who does she ring up? Jarvis. She burns electricity night and day, just for spite, so Jarvis will have to pay. And Jarvis won’t cut down his wine bills, nothing like that, so really it all comes out of my housekeeping. Why should I have to pay for Jarvis’s past mistakes? And tit-wise, Judy, Madeleine is flat as a board, and twice as boring and six times as miserable, and she had the nerve to come whining round here this morning because I’d taken her precious Hilary to have her beastly hair cut. And as for Hilary, great fat creature, she has no sense of gratitude at all. You know my only hope? That Madeleine will find some other poor bastard and torment him, instead of me. But who’d look at her? Dreadful scrawny creature.

Lily pauses for breath. Philip speaks.

PHILIP
: It might work out cheaper to hire a gigolo: had you thought of that?

Margot blinks. Philip, her Philip, said that? And Lily turns to smile at Margot’s Philip, happy and relieved to be understood, to be forgiven so much sudden, bitter self-revelation. Jarvis is on his feet, burly and blurred.

JARVIS
: A toast! I offer a toast. Death and damnation to all ex-wives. Down with the leeches, the succubi, the old women of the world who suck men’s blood, destroy their life force, make them old before their time—
(and he sings)
‘Beauty is only skin-deep, but ugliness goes to the bone, the bone—’

The moon shines. It is ten to one. The hills lie silent under a clear sky: the road is a magic ribbon.

Oh, I am Madeleine, returning home. My pants are wet. Am I defiled? Perhaps Renee, whose white shirt I’m wearing, is right. Perhaps sex with her, gentle, companionable, kind, the conjunction of like to like, would be preferable to this feeling of having used and being used. But is Renee kind? Or does Renee hate the world and all its men with such ferocity, such bitterness, that it produces this love for women as its kind of side effect? I don’t hate men. I don’t. I hate Jarvis, but then he’s damaged me and my child. I didn’t hate my father. I loved him. I hate Lily because she is evil. My gorge rises. There is a black mist in front of my eyes. The smell of tooth powder lingers: makes me sick. Jarvis’s fault, all Jarvis’s fault. Jarvis, I hate you. Can’t you feel it?

Does Jarvis feel it? Is that why he stands now, wishing death upon inconvenient women? Listen to Jarvis, poor Jarvis.

Oh, I am Jarvis: child of love and shame. I am Jarvis, husband of Lily, child of Poppy. Poor Poppy, pretty mother, all short skirts and long legs, slippery almond eyes, kohled, and crimson mouthed.

Who’s for adventure? Who’s for a fling?

Oh, deary darling!

Poppy, decadent and doomed, hitch-hiked north one giddy Mayfair night in 1929, and lay with a lorry driver, rough trade, all muscle, sweat and grime, in the long summer grass in a layby south of Grantham, and found herself overwhelmed by what? Love? (or was it only the pleasure of being defiled?) Orgasm, hitherto unknown? But off, in any case, goes Poppy, to live, yes to live, with Harry the lorry driver in Wolverhampton, not even married to him, leaving friends shocked, envious and excited, drooping round galleries, discreetly sniffing heroin, dancing cheek to cheek, while Poppy, pregnant, swelling, makes her wild, nightly journeys up and down the old A1. There’s an adventure! Except Harry, noticing her tightening waistband, turns her out of the cab one rainy night, just north of Doncaster. Harry won’t marry Poppy, wouldn’t think of it. Harry wants a decent girl; someone who is not defiled by him. Who wouldn’t?

And there Poppy is, presently, alone with Jarvis her baby, her passion, her pride: the old world lost to her, the new one disowning her, and just as well, for the stench of reality, of poverty, is up her flaring nostrils at last.

Back comes Poppy to London, Jarvis tucked up under her arm, illegitimate. No social security then: no dole for unmarried mothers (whores): no pill: no family planning clinics, just don’t forget: you fornicate at your peril. Poppy is lucky. Poppy marries Hector, spindly stockbroker, her own sort, who accepts Jarvis as his own. But Jarvis is not; never will be. Jarvis has broad shoulders: good God, Jarvis has a chin. Hector and Poppy together make plump children with pop eyes and receding chins. Poppy loves them dutifully; but loves her Jarvis with a mixture of passion and despair.

Hector loves little Jarvis not at all. Neither do his brothers and sisters. Jarvis looks strange, acts oddly, paints, draws (what an ungentlemanly activity) in the formality of this Home Counties house, on the edge of the golf course.

And Poppy looks wistfully out over the green of the unnatural landscape, sipping (later knocking back) the gin, mouth sweetly smiling, knees kept tight together except in the course of distasteful wifely duty, lamenting the courage she should have had, and never did, and the sweet smell of the long grass this side of Grantham.

Oh, I am Jarvis, Lily’s husband, the lorry driver’s son. I am Jarvis, Poppy’s baby, in that time of her life when she was truly alive. Years pass: nothing is resolved, little is understood. Only now I have Lily, and I am big bad Jarvis, my father’s son; I am Harry to her Poppy. I will never abandon her, or send her away. I will keep her, love her, recompense her. What I am doing is entirely necessary, entirely good, everyone’s salvation.

Why can’t Madeleine recognise this, understand it, accept it, and be happy?

Madeleine is like Jarvis’s half-sister Ruth. ‘Art?’ cried Ruth. ‘Beauty? Rot!’ and off she gallops on a horse’s back, pop-eyed and chinless, legs like a piano’s, thwacking the horse’s flanks, supremely confident, infinitely superior, her father’s daughter—and Ruth was the kindest, nicest one of all.

Madeleine and Hilary have to be sacrificed. Jarvis has no choice. But why won’t they lie down decently and gladly, as other sacrificial victims do? The slab is cool, clean, waiting. Not unpleasant. Their reluctance, their strugglings, are indecent. All this was decreed so long ago, the near side of Grantham, the far side of Doncaster. Lovely Poppy, defiled, defiant, delighting, baby Jarvis nibbling at her white unmarried breast.

Madeleine, I hate you. Lily, I love you. Lily, you are Poppy to my Harry. Nightly I defile, delight, re-live.

Madeleine die.

Ten to one. All decent folk are asleep; life-wishing, death-wishing in their dreams.

Nine minutes to one. The back left tyre of Madeleine’s car, worn thin, finally worn through, deflates. The car veers off through the central reservation, hits a post, carries on, crumbling as it goes, hits another. A twisting piece of metal from the bonnet sheers off Madeleine’s right leg above the knee: the steering wheel impacts itself into her chest; large or small, her tits, her boobs, her breasts, will not help her now. The car comes to a stop. In the total silence that ensues, in the few seconds left of life, Madeleine can hear her heart still beating. It is open to the air. Madeleine is not in pain: not as she remembers pain: splitting and tearing to press out baby Hilary, as the sun split and tore to give birth to the world.

Hilary, thinks Madeleine. Hilary my child. What will become of Hilary? What have I been thinking of, these years, these times? Thinking myself Jarvis’s wife, when all I was was Hilary’s mother? What have I done to Hilary?

Lily shall not have Hilary. Must not.

Who then?

Madeleine’s heart stops. In the distance, now, the sound of sirens. But Madeleine’s world is silence. Madeleine is dead.

No, thinks Madeleine, with some spurt of power coming from God knows where; some dart of spite and compassion mixed, hate and love struggling for supremacy, as if the struggle, rather than the emotions, which heaven knows are common enough, provided more than enough energy to transcend a perfectly common-place death.

No.

Who?

I am Margot, doctor’s wife, in inner turmoil, smiling sweetly, sipping Cointreau.

The doctor sits up straighter, accepts brandy—Philip? Accepting brandy at twelve fifty-four a.m., knowing that it gives him acid indigestion, that it makes him disagreeable to his patients, not to mention his family? Philip watches Lily, Lily smiling not sweetly, smiling with pleasure at her own depravity. And Philip smiles, Margot knows, at the vision of Lily abandoned not to spite, but to sexual excess. Betraying Philip. Evil, evil Lily.

Margot feels cold, she feels horrified. The wind blows through the open window. Margot puts her hand to her head. Margot shrieks. Margot falls upon the floor. ‘My leg,’ cries Margot. Margot writhes.

The others stare. This, the best-behaved of the lady guests?

Margot’s breath comes in gasps: she pulls herself up and leans against the sofa. One hand slaps at her right leg with a curious waving, banging movement, as if the leg has no business to be there; the other hand hits and hits and hits her chest. Philip stares at his wife, bemused. Apart from anything else, the movements seem out of conjunction, like the limb movements of Siamese twins.

‘Shall I call a doctor?’ says Jarvis, hopelessly, helplessly.

Philip turns irritated eyes away from his wife towards his host.

‘Don’t be more of a fool than you can help,’ he observes, and pulls his wife to her feet, so she can no longer hit and slap in such a disturbing fashion.

‘Margot,’ he says sharply, ‘stop all this.’

Margot does. She moans and sways instead.

Judy and Jamie, the while, though fascinated by the lady guest’s hysteria, still have eyes only for each other. Though not very nice eyes. For Jamie breathes down the back of Lily’s neck and mutters ‘You shouldn’t have flirted with the lady’s husband. See what happens?’

And Judy says, ‘Jamie, stop feeling up Lily. You don’t annoy me in the least. You merely betray your age.’ And Judy, approaching from behind, tips a little of her brandy down between Jamie’s collar and his shirt.

Lily wishes she didn’t give dinner parties.

‘I’ll never forgive you for this,’ says Jamie to Judy, and one could almost believe him.

Lily half shivers, half shudders, both from Jamie’s hot breath and Judy’s malice, and because a sudden gust of cold wind from the open window slams the kitchen door and seems to wake Jonathon upstairs. At any rate he sets up a piercing yell of fright and rage.

What an evening! Whose fault? Jarvis’s, without a doubt, so Lily thinks.

‘Why in God’s name did you open the window?’ It’s all she can think of for the moment, while she listens to see if Hilary will quieten Jonathon. Philip has lain Margot down on the sofa, and is busy loosening her what? Her stays, Lily fears. Supposing Margot is sick? What will happen to the watered-silk covers?

‘I didn’t open the window,’ retorts Jarvis, over the babel, ‘why do you automatically blame me for everything?’

And before Lily can compose her reply there’s a thump thump down the stairs and Hilary stands in the living room doorway, apparently unconscious of the fact that her white nightie is undone and her puffed-up bosom plainly visible, and Jonathon still yelling upstairs.

‘There’s something the matter with Jonathon,’ says Hilary, ‘I can’t quiet him.’

‘Perhaps you pinched him,’ says Jarvis, watching the movement of his wife’s buttocks as she pushes past Hilary and runs to her child. A real emergency would sober him: these current events merely make him feel dizzy.