Remember Me (17 page)

Renee sends Hilary back to Jarvis and Lily, and offers to feed the guinea pig until a decision concerning its future can be made.

Some deaths move us: others don’t. One friend dies and we remain indifferent; another dies, perhaps less intimate, and we see ourselves as dead, and weep, mourn, tear our hair or find ourselves caught up in the madness of the wake, competing with others as to who was closest, now suffers most; until the passage of time—or indeed, the visiting of the dead, dissolves these unholy linkages and we can let the dead alone at last.

We are all part of one another. Separation is bound to come painfully.

Renee is not much grieved by Madeleine’s death, and that is that. Renee thinks perhaps Madeleine had it coming. Renee wishes she had not lent Madeleine her new white blouse (the remains of which, as Renee rightly fears now mingle with Madeleine’s torn flesh, discreetly covered by the white mortuary shroud). Renee feels the same kind of impatient, companionable sympathy for Madeleine, dead, as she did for Madeleine living.

So much, thinks Renee, for vanity. Madeleine punished at last for her assorted, dismal heterosexual cravings, which did her, in the end, so little good.

Madeleine adorned for the delectation of the predatory male, dressed up like a lamb, dead as mutton.

Bon appetit!

‘Onward Christian soldiers,’ sings Clarence, loudly and valiantly, as his shift ends, and the murmurings in his ears subside.

G
OOD MORNING AGAIN.

Or so they say.

Is this all, thinks Margot, waking, hollow-eyed, is this all my life is to be? My children growing older, my husband growing fatter, myself more bored and boring day by day.

Disloyal, discontented Margot! She wants to pinch her husband: instead she caresses him, a timid, unexpected flutter of her hands upon his inner thigh, but he sleeps deeply, heavily, and does not respond.

Up gets Margot, furious.

All this bad temper, she thinks, peering at herself in the mirror, is wreaking havoc with my complexion. It seems to her that her skin is yellowish, instead of its usual nutty, freckly, healthy self.

The telephone rings. She is alarmed. Bad news travels unduly early, or unduly late. But it is only Enid, Margot’s friend, ringing before Sam gets up. Enid thinks she’s pregnant. Does Margot, the doctor’s wife, think it’s possible.

‘I thought you were on the pill,’ says Margot. ‘I gave it up a month back,’ says Enid. ‘It hardly seemed worth while. Only once or twice a month, the way things have been lately, and it’s not as if I’m a young woman any more. Thirty-nine, after all.’

‘Young enough,’ says Margot, and feels such a stab of jealousy as quite confounds her. Is Enid to have husband, career, and now a baby too? ‘What does Sam say?’ she enquires.

‘I haven’t told
Sam,’
says Enid, in disparaging tones, such as Margot has never before heard Enid use of her husband.

‘You’d better come and see Philip,’ Margot says. ‘He’s quite good about that kind of thing. So long as you’re not married to him, of course.’

And Enid has never heard Margot speak of Philip in such tones before.

‘I’d rather do a test,’ Enid says. ‘You see them advertised. It just might be an early menopause. I’d rather it was. Can you see Sam with a
baby
?’

Good morning!

‘It’s no use moping round the house,’ says Lily briskly to Hilary. ‘You really should have gone to school. You can’t take days off just because you feel like it.’

Well, look what happens when you do! Lily snatched Hilary out of school to have her hair cut, and what ensued?

Madeleine was lured back to her one-time home: an unholy bond sprang up between her and the doctor’s wife: and now look. It did not go unnoticed, after all, that Hilary’s lovely hair lay in piles upon the hairdresser’s floor. Better she’d stayed safely at school—or as safe as her platform heels would let her be.

Lily feels it, too late.

This morning Jarvis has gone to Custerley to identify the body. Hilary wanted to go with him, but it was not allowed. Hilary stayed in bed, instead, until it was too late to go to school. Lily actually had to go out and buy Sugar Puffs to entice her tearful stepdaughter down to breakfast. Lily the tea-lady’s daughter, showing culinary kindness, at which she excels.

‘I don’t believe she’s dead at all,’ says Hilary now, stuffing and puffing. ‘There’s some mistake. She doesn’t feel dead to me.’

‘We have to face facts,’ says Lily. Facts? Lily’s little sister Baby Rose, face downwards in a rock pool, drowned, long long ago, was that a fact? Ah yes, and a fact to be faced fearlessly, even joyfully. Even her mother’s sorrow muted by the usefulness of the event. After Baby Rose died, Lily’s mother, duly punished, could go back to Lily’s father, and to his fleshy overpowering love, crude as the knives he wielded, tough as the flesh he pierced, and delicate as his hands, as he so elegantly deftly, jointed, rolled and strung—Ida’s husband was the best butcher in New Zealand, everyone knew. Poor Ida! She who should have married a solicitor, a scientist, an art historian, bound by the flesh to a Bay of Islands butcher. And decades later, here is Lily, succeeding where her mother failed. Married to an English architect. But all Lily feels for her mother is a kind of proud, harsh anger.

‘Daddy might not know it’s Mummy,’ says Hilary, ‘it’s so long since he saw her.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ says Lily.

‘He didn’t even like her,’ his daughter persists. ‘He might make a mistake.’

‘Of course he liked her,’ says Lily, angry as she always is in her lies. ‘He was married to her.’

She has never said it before, never quite admitted it. The marriage between Jarvis and Madeleine was real, real as her own, though in a different time. Or if not quite that, real as her mother’s and father’s was real. The acceptance makes her softer. ‘Poor Hilary,’ she says, and stretches out her cool hand to touch the flushed and dumpy Hilary, but all Hilary says is, moving away, ‘I wish I hadn’t had my hair cut. Everyone pointed and stared and laughed.’

‘I’m sure they didn’t,’ says Lily, but she knows quite well, of course, they had.

‘Anyway,’ says Hilary, cheering up, ‘there’s always Jonathon, isn’t there. Can I take him for a walk?’

‘Better not,’ says Lily, fearing she knows not what.

‘Why not?’ Hilary persists. ‘He’d love to go to the swings.’

‘No,’ says Lily sharply, and that is that.

So Hilary plays patience instead, and waits for time to stretch itself between her sense of now and the occasion of her loss. She imagines it will have to stretch itself to the very ends of her life before this day can join the others, and fit neatly and painlessly into the receding patterns of the past. When she is eighty or ninety perhaps, she will be able to say, ‘Oh yes. When I was a girl of fourteen I lost my mother. She was killed in a car accident,’ and feel no pain.

Madeleine is wheeled out, ready for inspection by her next of kin. Jolt and jump. Her eyes fly open.

Hi there!

Jonathon develops a little fever. His nose is running. His eyes are bleary. Perhaps he would have done better over at the swings, with Hilary standing (as was her custom) between her half-brother and her mother.

Lily does a little gardening, a little pruning. Snip snip amongst the thorns. She wears white gloves. She does not like the notion of Jarvis having to visit Madeleine, dead or alive. She thought she’d put an end to all that, years ago.

Oh, I am Lily the tea-lady’s daughter, the tired U.S. serviceman’s delight. Little bleached girl amongst piles of spiky white driftwood, seen by nobody, missed by none; them so large with their bold exploring hands, and me so small; skinny thighed, tiny breasted. No older than Hilary in years.

Hilary has no instincts, thinks Lily, despising her: though what good Lily’s early instincts did Lily, is not in the long run too apparent. Lily did what she wanted, at the time, what Lily needed. At least Lily was too young, too small, too unformed to get pregnant. Hilary will get pregnant at the first opportunity, thinks Lily; she is the type—generally messy, over-flowing and prone to emotional demonstration.

I must get Hilary on the pill, thinks Lily. At least I’ll have control of that aspect of her upbringing from now on.

Jarvis, where are you?

Jarvis the absentee father! Can he not protect his daughter at all from the ravages of his wife? Any more than the butcher could protect his daughter, stolen away from him as she was?

So there you are, Jarvis.

Jarvis looks at Madeleine’s face. He had not known quite what to expect of the faces of the dead. But here is Madeleine, and looking, moreover, as he would most like to remember her—on the point of saying something nice and not something nasty. A frame frozen, at a singularly fortunate time. The trouble is, that living with, as one might say, Madeleine’s successor, as he does, Jarvis has trained himself in the remembrance of bad times.

‘I thought the dead looked more dead than that,’ he observes to Arthur.

‘Most do,’ says Arthur. His legs are troubling him. He has spent a lifetime standing about on cold floors, with hard surfaces, the better to be washed and purified of putrefaction of the dead.

Jarvis reaches out his hand to touch Madeleine’s cheek.

‘Don’t,’ says Arthur sharply. ‘Please don’t touch the corpses.’

But Jarvis had already done so.

‘She’s warm,’ says Jarvis. And then, as if relieved; ‘No. My fingers have been resting on cold metal, that’s all. She feels warm by comparison. Well, that must be it.’

Does Jarvis want Madeleine dead or alive? Does the possibility of her resurrection gladden him, or disappoint him? Alas, it seems he would prefer her safely dead: his relief as her skin grows cold—or his fingers grow warm—demonstrates the truth of the matter. Although it cannot be denied—nor would he wish to—that he was shocked and saddened by the manner of Madeleine’s dying, and his own part in it.

Jarvis fills in the necessary forms. Arthur recommends an undertaker. The inquest will be a formality, and will take place on the following day. The deceased has no near relatives. Even Hilary is not Madeleine’s any more—not since the divorce courts made Jarvis her guardian.

How sadly depleted Madeleine leaves this world.

And how richly Jarvis, looking forward, will leave it; by virtue of his temperament, his masculinity, his will to life and sex, his attachment to domesticity and the trivial trappings of this world. All those things which Madeleine, in her pride and in her youth, rejected.

And how unfair it all is! How little is virtue rewarded. In the white-painted room, with its cold floors and colder occupants, its green-tiled walls and the dead daddy-longlegs swept up in corners, the air is alive again with a confluence of comment, indignation and argument. It is as if Madeleine’s body, so little regarded in life, has in death become the focal point of some kind of group energy, some social concentration, some common search for consensus; of the kind which sends our communities lurching in one direction or another towards their gradual betterment.

Unfair!

Jarvis will have a grand and well-peopled funeral; it is his very proper ambition. He hesitates to consider the solitary glumness that will be Madeleine’s. Will Jarvis be there to watch? Will anyone? Or will Jarvis allow the disposal of Madeleine’s body to be attended to in the same spirit as the inquest—as a formality, symptoms of society’s determination to acknowledge the quantity of its members, everyone: to number them, list them, and record their beginnings, their middles, their ends, births, marriages, and deaths, while yet ignoring the quality of these events?

Jarvis cannot decide. He is upset. He has a cold in his nose. He goes back to London, eyeing all the dents and breaks in the motorway’s central barrier with morbid fascination. Was it here, or there, that Madeleine met her death? He leaves the motorway to find a pub, and has two double whiskies and a pork pie. He feels better. He is putting on weight.

Unfair!

Some people, like Madeleine, like Lily, can eat and eat and stay slim. Others, like Jarvis, eat a pork pie and develop a paunch.

Arthur plods over to the window to shut it yet again. The daddy-longlegs have whirled from the sill in a gust of turbulence, and disintegrated. Someone, Arthur thinks, must keep coming and opening the window. He feels they don’t, but knows they must. He will be glad when Madeleine’s body is gone. He has felt similar unease about perhaps three other bodies in all his years as mortuary attendant, but prefers not to let the feelings harden into opinions, let alone conclusions. Dead is dead, or else his work becomes impossible.

Unfair!

The Dial-a-Date agency try to locate Madeleine on Mr Quincey’s behalf; get hold of Renee: and phone Mr Quincey back to say unfortunately his date is dead. Mr Quincey cries, and is comforted. It is something, in a lonely life, to have someone to mourn. Presently he telephones Renee and tries to ascertain from her the time and place of the funeral. He would like to come, he says. But Renee is chilly and evasive. She does not know: she has not heard: she herself does not believe in funerals. Neither did Madeleine. Dead is dead. Bodies should be carted off by the council. She’d heard Madeleine say as much, many times.

In any case, in what possible capacity could Mr Quincey attend Madeleine’s funeral? Besides if Madeleine hadn’t gone to Cambridge, she’d still be alive and there wouldn’t be any need for a funeral.

A point which had already occurred to Mr Quincey.

Unfair!

When Mr Quincey puts the phone down he is gripped by a fierce pain in his stomach, so fierce that he collapses, groaning on the floor of the hall. The landlady calls the doctor: the doctor the ambulance: at the hospital they diagnose a peptic ulcer, allay his pain, and keep him in for tests. He likes the hospital: it is warm, friendly and crowded. He sleeps better that night than ever he did at home; the constant murmurings, outbreaks of coughing and variety of breathings in the ward remind him of the companionable dormitories of his orphanage childhood. The night sister reminds him of Madeleine.